The last five minutes of last year’s 28 Years Later, the late horror sequel that saw director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland reteam, felt incredibly out of place. After an entire movie of somber coming-of-age tragedy and metaphysical reflection on the nature of life and death, a gang of violent Jimmy Saville impersonators led by Jack O’Connell in a tiara showed up to set up a sequel. That sequel, Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—still written by Garland—proves the Jimmy ending wasn’t merely a weird setup, it was a promise of the buckwildness to come. Despite a few creaky moments and some nauseating violence, I had a ball with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple; here’s my review.
Unmoored by the need to set up the world, the stakes, or even the socio-political clime of the UK after nearly 30 years with a rampant rage infection, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a straightforward journey into Hell that nevertheless features glimmers of hope for the infected of the third film. While Alfie Williams’ Spike is still central, he’s much more of an unwilling observer to the Jimmies’ acts of carnage, while the clear protagonist is Ralph Fiennes’ philosophical man of science, Dr. Kelson.
In a continuation of themes from 28 Years Later, Kelson spends the bulk of The Bone Temple with the Alpha Infected Samson (Chi-Lewis Parry) and his floppin’ dong. Kelson shoots Samson with blow darts that have sedative tips, which he believes not only makes Infected temporarily docile, but quiets the pain that fuels their rage in the first place. Samson begins to come back to Kelson specifically to receive this opiate, and Kelson begins to formulate his theory as to what might end up a cure for this infection.
Meanwhile, Spike is living in the nightmare of Sir Jimmy Crystal and his belief that he and his seven fingers are the fist of Old Nick, aka Satan himself. After 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple‘s harrowing and gut-wrenching opening sequence, Spike is forced to join as the new Jimmy, with only Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) showing him any compassion. The group marauds across the land, committing acts of “charity” on poor survivors, which amounts to some of the most brutal torture sequences we’ve seen in mainstream horror in ages. Not for the faint of heart. Give me Samson tearing people’s heads off any day.
The Samson and Kelson storyline is obviously the more compelling and more contemplative one in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. It reminded me a lot of George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead, with Bub the zombie regaining some humanity through a scientist’s experimentation. Here, though, Fiennes is gentler, clearly more concerned about his new “friend” than with any major breakthrough. In any case, Garland’s script lays out the basics, if not the absolute formula, for how a cure could happen. Will it? That’s for later installments to solve.
As for the other half of the movie, I can see it really turning off people. In The Bone Temple, O’Connell is over-the-top in both humor and brutality that doesn’t jive with what we’ve seen from the previous installments of the 28 Days/Years franchise. Jimmy and several of the seven fingers—especially Emma Laird’s Jimmima—are terrifying in their ghoulish glee. Poor Spike spends much of his screentime holding back tears, or vomiting, and the central torture sequence at a farmhouse is hard to watch.
DaCosta tackles the material in a way visually distinctive to Boyle’s, and that’s to this movie’s benefit. Boyle’s style, harkening back to the original in 2000, feels as close to shot-on-a-camcorder as it’s possible to feel. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has a much more deliberate style and pace, without the frenetic editing and MTV-era jump cutting. It’s still visceral and upsetting, and there’s a climactic fire-lit sequence in the titular Bone Temple that really cooks (it elicited a round of applause in my critics screening).
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is certainly uneven. However, it also doesn’t aspire to the level of horror art that Boyle did, and I do think that’s what made me ultimately enjoy this outing a bit more than the last. It’s not as ponderous, far less tragic, and while not scary in the usual terms, is horrific while holding on to a sense of fun I think was largely absent from last year’s movie. Kelson listens to music, he and Samson have funny conversations, and Samson even does surprising things that add to the levity.
This feels like just another adventure in the post-apocalypse rather than a portentous omen or a pointed critique of society. Its set-up for Boyle’s third part feels earned and has me more excited than less. I hope people enjoy 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple for what it is, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I dug it.
⭐ (4 of 5)
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
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