28 Years Later: The Bone Temple <\/p>\n
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Director: Nia DaCosta<\/p>\n
Cert: 16<\/p>\n
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Maura Bird<\/p>\n
Running Time: 1 hr 49 mins<\/p>\n
Where to go after the epic blend of folk horror and state-of-the-nation satire that was 28 Years Later<\/a>? <\/p>\n If Danny Boyle<\/a>\u2019s threequel to his groundbreaking 28 Days Later had a flaw \u2013 and it probably didn\u2019t \u2013 it concerned an excess of ambition. The 2025 film combined commentary on Brexit with a wider consideration of English isolationism that took in a montage to Rudyard Kipling\u2019s Boots. (And plenty of brain eating, obviously.)<\/p>\n Nia DaCosta<\/a>\u2019s Bone Temple is a tighter, more shamelessly horrid affair that is most notable for an eventual circle back to concerns of the 2002 original. <\/p>\n Last year we left young Spike (Alfie Williams) in the worrying care of a dubious gang led by the creatively demented Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O\u2019Connell<\/a>). There was some furrowing of brows when, after absorbing Crystal\u2019s appearance in the dying minutes of that film, cinemagoers clocked that his cadre took queasy inspiration from the disgraced DJ Jimmy Savile<\/a>.<\/p>\n You won\u2019t need to be told that, decades earlier, a virus turned much of the British population into slavering zombies and sent the rest into dystopian hibernation. The Jimmys make their way about the blasted territories of northern England in yellow wigs and clattering chains. Their repeated chant of \u201cHowzat?\u201d references Savile\u2019s now chilling \u201cHow\u2019s about that then?\u201d (also the title of the serial sex abuser\u2019s authorised biography).<\/p>\n There is a half-serious point being made here about the distorting effects of unreliable nostalgia. The virus arrived when Savile\u2019s crimes were the stuff of schoolyard rumour rather than devastating personal testimony. But all that is in deep background. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that, their mythology greatly elaborated from that brief coda in the previous film, the Jimmys are largely here to generate dubious unease.<\/p>\n This fourth episode \u2013 sometimes straying into torture porn \u2013 is the most gratuitously nasty of the series so far. Early on, a knife fight ends with blood fountaining from a femoral artery. An inverted crucifixion played out to key lines from the Gospel of St Matthew may once have generated protests but is now more likely to trigger weary rolling of eyes. It\u2019s as disgracefully diverting as it is silly. <\/p>\n