He's been training 28 years to get this right on the night
dir: Nia DaCosta
2026
That was… insane.
I thought pretty highly of 28 Years Later, but this second half caps this story off beautifully.
And what a deeply strange story it is.
Jack O’Connell has played evil fuckers for a good long while, and this character is probably one of his nastiest, and it follows closely on the heels of him playing another evil fucker in Sinners, only his prosthetic teeth here are far nastier, somehow.
This flick does not stand alone as a separate story, in that, someone watching this one without having seen the one from last year would have no fucking idea what’s going on, none whatsoever, although the same would not be said for someone who watched 28 Years Later without watching 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later.
That doesn’t detract from my enjoyment in the slightest. It picks up immediately where the previous flick ended, being poor Spike (Alfie Williams) being in the hands of the awful people who saved him from certain death at the hands of the infected.
These strange wig wearing weirdoes are the Jimmys, led by Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell), who forces his minions to wear ill-fitting, painful looking wigs, and to call themselves some variation of Jimmy, and do his infernal bidding. They are his Fingers, and he takes orders from Old Nick, who seems to tell him to do the same thing every time they come across uninfected survivors: torture then murder people.
Seems like a shitty way to spend the British apocalypse, but it’s not like Spike is given much of a choice. He is given the option of being able to die instead but as luck would have it he survives an altercation with a Jimmy that leaves that Jimmy dead and Spike alive.
Though maybe it would have been easier to just die already.
Completely separate from these Jimmy related shenanigans, that crazy orange guy at the ossuary is still doing his thing, being Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, never better or weirder), who is determined to put every bone and skull in its right place in his monument to those lost in the epidemic.
He keeps drugging the alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) with morphine, but now he likes hanging out with the brute and singing Duran Duran songs with him, and also getting high on his own supply. A large proportion of this flick is Kelson and Samson, lying on the grass together, spacing out, wondering about the future. Kelson is convinced that he can get through to Samson some way, and maybe obviate some of the symptoms of the infection, and Sampson, well, who knows what’s going through that massive rage virus-infected noggin of his?
Actually, we kinda do know now. In the midst of a scene where Samson grabs and dismembers some poor bastard and eats his brains, we see through his eyes and see that he sees the uninfected as infected, ravenous monsters. Presumably he doesn’t see the infected as such, but something induces this hallucination.
We might think Kelson’s tender ministrations towards Samson are a bit strange, but I guess he has been lonely for a very long time. He just wants a giant naked friend to hang out with, and maybe cure. And if he can’t cure him, well, he has another plan.
You might think the two stories; The Jimmys and Kelson *hearts* Sampson, will have to converge at some point, and they do, but first we have to spend an inordinate amount of time watching the Jimmys torture a homestead full of survivors first, as if we didn’t know that they were monsters already. Just so you know this flick has its priorities right.
When three people cautiously go out looking to forage mushrooms, possibly for dinner, possibly for a nice Beef Wellington to serve the family, two of them start running fast when infected appear, meaning one of them isn’t going to make it. Like the old adage goes; they don’t have to run faster than the infected, just faster than their slow poke friend. When they survive that altercation, they return to a homestead filled with wig-wearing weirdoes who are clearly up to no good.
Charity – the word charity is used to highlight something awful that’s going to happen, as part of the very twisted worldview that Prime Jimmy is prey to. Not only is he convinced that Satan is somehow his father, he believes he speaks to him, wanting ever more excesses to occur when it comes to inflicting untold miseries upon the innocent.
Of course this is nothing new in zombie apocalypse stories: the humans are always worse than the infected, whether it’s the 28 series of movies or The Walking Dead or The Last of Us, because while the strange creatures can be terrifying and all consuming, they don’t have the intentionality, the sadism that the humans do, fully making choices to torment and destroy people just for their own amusement, not out of some necessity.
Thus Jimmy, controlling his minions with lies about why they do what they do, pretending it’s part of some grand scheme and bargain with the supernatural, is the true face of evil, rather than Sampson or any of the infected. Evil in the religious sense, and yet entirely mundane. There is no supernatural cause for his evil; nothing is controlling him or infecting him, but he believes (his own bullshit, somehow), he truly believes in doing evil.
When he does meet Kelson, it leads to the most extraordinary scene of the year, perhaps of any year, as Jimmy demands that Kelson pretend to be his “father” Old Nick, and put on a show for the Fingers, in order to cement their loyalty.
Before that demand, they have an extraordinary conversation that might as well be Science versus Religion in human form. Kelson is as gentle and as forthright as Fiennes can make him be, seeing as even though he’s never met Jimmy before or seen him in action, he senses based solely on his words, his demeanour and definitely those teeth, that Jimmy is a demented princeling that needs to see people suffering in order to feel alive. That’s a strange thing to come to terms with when you live in a literal bone temple you’ve constructed over the last 28 years.
And that just because Kelson doesn’t believe in gods or devils doesn’t mean he’s not going to put on a good show of it in order to spare some lives.
Much will be said of it, much will be made of it, but the scene that eventuates, being essentially a performance by Fiennes pretending to be the devil incarnate as Iron Maiden’s 666 The Number of the Beast, is like the scene of the decade. It’s hilarious, delirious, insane – it’s a lot.
Even if you don’t think about the minutiae around the scene, it works on bunches of levels. He’s doing all this for essentially a group of feral kids who’ve never heard recorded music, never heard metal, never heard anything. They know nothing about the world that existed prior to the collapse of British society, being way younger than Jimmy himself, who was a child when it happened, and the most they know of entertainment is the psychedelic episodes of the Teletubbies that Jimmy misremembers the plots of. He talks of televisions, of them having televisions in their bellies, and watching other televisions, when they’ve never seen a working television themselves, and all the shenanigans and tomfoolery they got up to.
Which means they’ve never seen a film clip, never watched any viral videos… in some ways they’re the lucky ones. To them this would have to be the greatest moment of their lives, even if they’re not all going to be living much longer, but what a way to go, eh?
I will be the first to admit that this review must sound even more garbled than usual, but then the film I’m talking about is somewhat more insane than most films usually are, even when they’re horror flicks. It’s not so much a film about deconstructing monsters, but of allowing for their experiences to encompass something much stranger than what we’d expect, inside or outside of this franchise. Watching Fiennes do his thing is a tremendous pleasure, but so much more of this flick is the curious enjoyment derived from watching Sampson delve back into his human memories, much of which focus on a particular train that seems to have played a big role in both of these movies, leaving him almost defenceless in the face of an assault by what he thought were his fellow travellers.
Spike’s story arc isn’t a particularly involved one, since it’s him looking terrified for most of the flick, looking sick, or desperately trying to find an ally, and thankfully he finds one in so-called Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), but mostly, considering how crucial his presence is to what happens in the finale, I had hoped that Spike would have realised he never should have left his Holy Island in the first place.
And after all that, after what’s been a very entertaining flick for me, a character is shown from way back in the first flick, and a piece of music is used, both prominent in 28 Days Later, and while it’s just another fucking cliffhanger of an ending, it’s a very enjoyable one.
Remarkable stuff. Nia DaCosta has finally made a flick that works unequivocally, and is a rip-roaring success, which almost makes up for her Candyman remake.
Almost.
8 times I can’t think of a better fate for poor Jimmy than what befalls him here out of 10
--
“So you owe me... Only kidding, I'm NHS; free of charge!” – everywhere in the world has better healthcare than the US, even post-apocalyptic Britain! - 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple
- 169 reads