28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

Unnecessary. That's the word. One word, and it covers everything you need to know about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. But I'll give you a few hundred more, because I sat through it, and I've earned the right to have a moan.

Look, I want to be fair here. I was already a bit lukewarm on 28 Years Later. It felt like a lot of setup for something that never quite arrived. But I was willing to go along for the ride, willing to believe the payoff was coming. The Bone Temple is that payoff, and it turns out the payoff is nothing. Genuinely, structurally, narratively nothing. You could watch 28 Days Later, skip everything in between, catch the final two minutes of this film, and you'd be standing in exactly the same place. The franchise has moved nowhere. Done nothing. Said nothing.

And poor 28 Weeks Later has just been completely abandoned by the side of the road. That film had ideas. It had tension, it had a horrible, creeping dread to it. The continuity it built has been cheerfully ignored, and now we're here, watching a movie that functions essentially as DLC for the previous instalment, except DLC you'd feel ripped off paying two quid for.

The infected, the whole terrifying reason this franchise exists, are barely in it. Think about that for a second. The rage virus, the thing that turned British horror on its head, reduced to a background detail in its own sequel. And then there's Samson. Samson, who after one handful of pills that are twenty-eight years old, is cured enough to hold a conversation. Just like that. Twenty-eight years, some expired medication, and we're chatting. I'm not asking for hard science in a zombie film, but I am asking for a basic internal logic that the film respects for longer than five minutes.

The Jimmys, who arrive with what feels like it should be genuine menace, simply disappear. No consequence, no resolution, no weight. They wander into the story and wander back out again, as if the script forgot about them between drafts. This is a self-contained film that somehow also fails to contain anything of interest.

And then. And then. The Iron Maiden concert. A full, apparently raucous concert, complete with pyrotechnics, blazing lights, and the kind of noise that would carry for miles. Attracting zero infected. Zero. In a world where the infected are drawn to any sign of human activity, a full stadium rock show with fireworks is apparently fine. I genuinely laughed out loud. I don't think I was supposed to.

None of the links in my little list of other reviews feel like they belong here, and I won't force them. What I will say is that there is horror out there, good horror, horror that does something with its premise. This isn't it.

The box office will tell the story more bluntly than I can. When you build a franchise on the back of a genuinely brilliant, lean, frightening original, you owe the audience something. The Bone Temple offers nothing. It burns screen time, wastes whatever goodwill 28 Years Later had generated, and ends the trilogy not with a bang or even a whimper, but with a shrug. A shrug and some pyrotechnics that apparently no one noticed.

One and a half stars, and I'm being generous because at least the concert was unintentionally funny.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2026  | Watched: 2026-01-17

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Where to watch

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

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
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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