Humanity is the enemy in '28 Days Later'

By Glenn Lovell
Knight Ridder Newspapers

28 DAYS LATER Stars: Rated: R (for profanity, extreme violence) Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

And who can't identify with that?

Danny Boyle's even-more-ambitious U.K.-set "28 Days Later" may not be in the same league, but it comes close enough to make it required viewing for anyone craving an early-summer rush. Like Romero, Boyle drops us headlong into a world overrun by the scabrous undead, who add to their ranks by snacking on what's left of the living.

Romero's zombies had something to do with a satellite and an extraterrestrial virus; Boyle's plague, which spreads quickly to all corners of the British Isles, is bred the old-fashioned way, right here on Earth. It begins at a Cambridge research center where chimps have been infected with some unnamed virus (AIDS? SARS?) that causes instantaneous rage. In the first of several grim ironies, animal-rights do-gooders unleash the contagion.

Thanks to an accident-induced coma, Jim (Cillian Murphy) sleeps through whatever has devastated London. Calling "Hello! Hello!" down empty streets, across Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, this New Age Rip van Winkle soon catches on: The city — strewn with missing-persons fliers and "The End is Nigh!" graffiti — has been evacuated. All that remains are marauding zombies and, holed up in apartments and corner groceries, pockets of cowering humans.

Already as hardened as any bounty hunter, Selena (Naomie Harris) takes Jim under her wing and teaches him how to dispatch the undead and, much tougher, the just-infected. Soon they join up with high-rise-dweller Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) and motor northeast in Frank's taxi toward what used to be Manchester, the source of a radio transmission promising "the answer to the infection."

There they find a small group of soldiers who have turned a country estate into an armed compound. But the soldiers have more on their minds than survival, and therein lies a horror greater than anything roaming the countryside.

Like his trend-setting "Trainspotting," easily one of the most influential films of the past 20 years, Boyle's latest proves both stylish and subversive. Recorded on digital video, it has the caught-on-the-run immediacy of a TV broadcast from ground zero. Boyle's shots of a deserted London and, later, Manchester on fire bring to mind newsreels of the Blitz. For a big-screen antecedent, you'd have to go back to the global-warming classic "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" (1961).

But what really sets this movie apart is its director's instant declaration of "Sit tight! We're not playing by the rules this time."

Instead of pokey, lockstep zombies, the norm in this kind of thing, Boyle's undead are fleet of foot. They actually sprint after their prey. Instead of changing after the usual incubation period (overnight or at least a few hours), victims now go all herky-jerky immediately. Instead of survivors who work as a unit, Boyle's nascent Adam and Eve, at least at the outset, are out for No. 1.

The opening passages — devoted to running, hiding and pilfering for food — are so good that Act 3 in the military compound can't help but be a letdown. Here, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, who collaborated on "The Beach," turn more heavy-handed and preachy (in the style of Romero's zombie-trilogy closer, "Day of the Dead").

Their message, shouted from the meadows and the rooftops: We have met the glassy-eyed enemy, and he is us!

But don't let this dissuade you. "28 Days Later" is the hippest, scariest horror movie to come down the pike in many a full moon. Numerous gory tableaux stay in mind after the lights (mercifully) come up. These include heads popping up from a mound of corpses, a drop of infected blood falling in agonizing slow-mo from above and a mad dash through a tunnel as the echo of footfalls grows louder and louder ... and louder.

This is the stuff of which night tremors are made.