Kritiken

“28 Years Later” is not only the third film in a series but the first film in a new trilogy... None of this is objectionable, let alone surprising; the careful packaging, consumption, and regurgitation of story material... is less a bug than a feature of the genre. But it can’t help but retroactively impart a certain roteness to the narrative, which feels trapped, with mechanical “gotcha” efficiency, between two bookends.

It’s thrilling to watch a new entry in a horror franchise veer completely off the rails of its chosen genre... Much of 28 Years Later brings to mind details from other works... yet the movie feels singular... [It] is abstract and unwieldy; at the same time, it’s impossible to look away from.

The original 28 Days Later... noted the civil unrest that had started to fester as the optimism of the early Blair years began to fade. This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

[28 Years Later] aims for [a] kind of profundity and, in some of the movie’s best moments, brushes the surface of it... As the start of a new trilogy for the franchise, it’s a promising entry that signals a different approach to a well-worn subgenre. If only it could figure out its footing.

[28 Years Later] reimagines the entire concept in a manner that is extravagantly bold, imaginative and brilliantly bizarre. There’s almost nothing like it... With an elegiac soundtrack courtesy of Young Fathers, it’s at turns funny, horrifying and even profound.

Whatever you think the third edition in this trilogy could be, Boyle and Garland gleefully subvert it... “28 Years Later,” an at times tonally daring and whimsically transportive coming-of-age zombie film, does the exact opposite of what you expect.

[Boyle] tends to overdirect the movie. When he’s at his best, Boyle delivers controlled kinetic chaos, and at his worst, erratic, tonal sloppiness, and “28 Years Later” tends to fall into that latter camp... However flawed, [the film] is enough to compel audiences to take the walkway across islands to the next terrifying chapter. O

[28 Years Later] has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It’s a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature... This confounding and headstrong movie doesn’t reveal everything it’s after. But it’s an intriguing comment on human progress.

[28 Years Later] is the rare movie that doesn’t get at least 20 percent better when Ralph Fiennes appears, and though his arrival here comes late in the story, his presence brings a sense of moral clarity that briefly lifts this hectic movie into a different, quieter dimension.

Partly shot with iPhones, the new movie sometimes has a degraded visual quality that dovetails with the more helter-skelter violence and abrades the realism of even the quieter passages.

But if 28 Years Later contains a little bit of everything that made the first film great, it also, somehow, adds up to less [than its predecessors]... This is an ambitious picture, filled with grand ideas. Parts of it are wondrously beautiful; some sections are so mawkishly morbid they might make you groan. But at least you won’t be bored.

It’s a film which man­ages to have its daft thrills and con­vinc­ing­ly piv­ot to wist­ful philo­soph­i­cal intro­spec­tion, and while there are cer­tain­ly some rough edges and unex­plored plot avenues, it prob­a­bly counts as one of Boyle’s strongest works this cen­tu­ry.