Genre Horror

28 Years Later (2025)

Item: 28 Years Later
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — 28 Years Later (2025)

Jimmy Savile Power Rangers. That's where we end up. That's the image I'm left with after sitting through 28 Years Later. A group of long-haired, colour-coordinated lunatics doing "Crouching Tiger" acrobatics in matching tracksuits, apparently the cavalry our young survivor deserves after everything he's been through. I've seen some daft endings in my time, but I genuinely cannot think of one more catastrophically tonedeaf than this. What an absolute let-down.

And look, I'm not going to dress this up. I love this franchise. I reviewed 28 Days Later (2002) and that film is genuinely special, tense, grubby, frightening in the way only British horror can be. So I came to this one hopeful, even excited. The opening works too. A flashback intro sets the mood nicely, and there's a God of War style father and son scavenging sequence early on that I really liked. The bones of something good are there. The problem is everything built on top of those bones makes less and less sense the longer the film goes on.

Let's start with the mythology, because the franchise has now basically "Somehow Palpatine returned" itself into a corner. In 28 Days Later, the infected starve. Britain is cleared. Then in 28 Weeks Later, resettlers come back, things go catastrophically wrong, and the film ends with infected charging towards the Eiffel Tower, the implication being Europe is next. So the clean explanation for this sequel? "Mainland Europe pushed the infected back." You're just going to say that? Out loud? Without blinking? That's not a story development, that's a retcon dressed up as a throwaway line, and it unravels everything the previous film built towards.

But here's the question that nagged at me from the very first scene and never got answered: if the infected starve after 28 days, how are there still hordes of them 28 years on? The film gives you a pregnant infected, which is actually a decent idea in principle. Primal, feral creatures, it tracks that biology would still function. But then the baby is born uninfected because of the placenta, so that's not the explanation either. So what is it? Crickets. The film just moves on and hopes you don't notice.

Then there's the doctor. A man who's apparently survived alone for 28 winters, kept himself fed and sheltered, gathered hundreds of corpses and built enormous skeletal monuments out of them like some kind of apocalyptic Minecraft project. Fair enough, people do extraordinary things to survive. But the community on the island knows he's there and their response to having a doctor a few hours away is essentially "he seemed a bit odd, so we left it." Nobody thought to go and get him? In 28 years? Right.

The Iodine thing made my head hurt. The doctor is coated in it because the infected don't like it. Fine. But his morphine darts are somehow still effective after nearly three decades, his supply appears limitless, and when he sedates an Alpha rather than, I don't know, slitting its throat, it eventually finds a weak spot in his shelter and tears through anyway. So the Iodine protects you, except when it doesn't. The morphine works, except when it's inconvenient. Pick a rule and stick to it.

Erick, the Swedish bloke who arrives mid-film, is actually quite charming. I liked him. But strip his scenes out and the plot doesn't change by a single frame. His entire purpose seems to be delivering exposition about phones and the Internet existing somewhere in the world, and then he gets his head ripped off. Great. Cheers for coming.

And the father. He knows exactly where his son is heading. He's more experienced, presumably faster over open ground. He never goes after them. The film just forgets he exists when it's convenient to do so.

So Spike, our young lad, survives all of this, drops off a miraculously uninfected baby, and sets off alone across Britain with barely enough arrows to last a single journey. And who rides to his rescue? The Jimmy Savile Power Rangers. Matching technicolour tracksuits. Improbable acrobatics. Long flowing blonde hair. I actually laughed out loud. I don't think I was supposed to.

There are franchises that manage to extend themselves without betraying what made them work. This isn't one of them. Too many plot holes, too much internal contradiction, and an ending so absurd it almost retroactively damages the films before it. One and a half stars, and the half is entirely for that early father and son sequence, which belonged to a much better film than the one it was unfortunately attached to.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2025-06-21

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Sky Go · Now TV Cinema
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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