It’s very rare for a fourquel to be the best film in a franchise, but that’s how things stand with the chequered 28 Days Later series. In this one, which follows immediately on from the previous episode, 28 Years Later, Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell bring pure death-metal craziness. There is real energy and drama in this latest iteration of the post-apocalyptic zombie horror-thriller saga, created by director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland back in 2003, with Nia DaCosta taking over directing duties for this film. Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career. At the screening I attended, we were on our feet, looking for a speaker bin to headbang into. The band surely has to rerelease this track with Fiennes’s performance as a new official video. His Voldemort was never so freaky.
It is just so exhilarating to see this intergenerational face-off between such superb actors as Fiennes and O’Connell. That brings us to the point of my agnosticism about this whole franchise; Bone Temple is the best for an interesting reason – because the zombies are almost entirely irrelevant and are at a minimum. The always slightly dull business of zombieism is de-emphasised, and what counts is the conflict between sentient human beings. Even the one important zombie here is interesting because he is being transformed into something else.
In the preceding film, set 28 years on from the original zombie-infection outbreak, a kid called Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the quarantined safety of Holy Island off England’s north-east coast for the zombie-infested mainland. He is brooding over rumours of a doctor played by Fiennes, a lone standard-bearer of decency and civilisation, who has created an ossuary-monument to fallen humanity: the bone temple. At the end of the earlier film, there was extraordinary new franchise-extension twist which critics could not mention due to spoiler rules and from which, even now, new viewers may want to avert their eyes.
It turns out there is a murderous Clockwork-Orangey gang of non-infected people roaming around – unafraid of zombies and more interesting than zombies – led by the bizarre Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) whose tracksuits and blond wigs are modelled on … erm … Jimmy Savile. It isn’t at all clear when these people will have seen Savile on screen; his heyday was long before their youth, although they do remember and idolise the Teletubbies.
The horrific Jimmies come across poor bewildered Spike, and this courageous kid witnesses at close quarters the bullies’ loathsome, ultraviolent way of life. And Sir Lord Jimmy, who has developed a whole psychopathic theology to justify his power over his credulous cowed followers, emerges as a horribly watchable new character (though Erin Kellyman plays a Jimmy disciple who is not so submissive).
We also see more of Fiennes’s Dr Ian Kelson, whose weird orange skin (the result of iodine self-treatment) and unusual deportment is fatefully misunderstood by the Jimmies. Dr Kelson is in fact trying to come to terms with the alpha zombie rampaging around the place, a giant he has named “Samson” (played by Chi Lewis-Parry); Dr Kelson’s almost Christlike gentleness and non-aggression, and his pharma stockpile, mean that we see unsuspected depths in Samson.
This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.
• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple in out on 15 January in Australia, and 16 January in the UK and US.
