Mighty Morphin’ Jimmy Rangers!

Previously on 28 Years Later: Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland reunited to imagine further adventures and new terrors in the world of their 2003 speed-freak zombie nightmare 28 Days Later, which redefined the subgenre’s rules for years to come. I wrote of 28YL, “Boyle shifts gears to a more measured pace as Garland reveals the film’s true heart — one of vain hopes in a hopeless environment, of love in an arena of rage, of reconnecting with inner humanity in the middle of the killing fields. Audiences gripped by fiercer bloodlust craving their EPIC KILLS NOW NOW NOW might then revolt. Given Garland’s recent track record for sometimes denying our base cravings, it’s worth wondering if maybe the best zombie movies are the ones that veer from the storytelling dead end by transforming into another kind of movie.” I didn’t expect Boyle to test me on this right then and there: the film’s last five minutes needle-scratched off the turntable into one last out-of-nowhere cliffhanger throwdown that felt like a Skittles ad starring Mr. T’s cartoon teen gymnastic squad.

That was never meant to be The End, though. Their planned trilogy continues with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, for which Boyle retires to a producer’s chair and invites guest director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, the Candyman remake) to team up with Garland and lay fresh eyes on what happens next. Once again most of the undead are reduced to incidental critters in favor of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, but the foregrounded terrors are all the scarier for it. That goes double for the dance number.

The Gist: Newcomers will find no 28YL recap at The Bone Temple‘s door: events pick up moments later with our li’l teen survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) far from his safe island home, having waded back into the UK’s post-apoc muck only to be saved and accosted by a sextet of homicidal maniacs who all wear long, ratty, blond wigs and call themselves Jimmy. Once they were the seemingly doomed kiddos in 28YL‘s disconnected prologue; now they’re nomadic acolytes to Jack O’Connell (Sinners‘ head vampire) playing another small-group murder-leader, this one self-dubbed Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal. In between his made-up anti-Scripture sermons they roam the zombified countryside to feast, to revel in their heinous ways, and to seek out victims for their own bloodying entertainment. Spike accidentally passes their hazing ritual, but his journeyman bow-and-arrow skills do not prepare him for long-term life in a Manson Family roadshow.

Meanwhile in the film’s other main plot, Ralph Fiennes’ benevolent, lightly mad, iodine-drenched Dr. Ian Kelson maintains his creepy mega-ossuary, shares some of his well-preserved vinyl collection with us (fitting the most Duran Duran into a film since Barbarella), and keeps pursuing his pet project: testing possible cures for the rampant zombie “infection” using 28YL‘s musclebound super-zombie Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry, a Gladiator II arena ally) as his guinea pig. Kelson’s quest might not be futile: the original 28DL confirmed the rage-virus doesn’t actually kill the afflicted like the transmissions in other zombie flicks. Kelson the big red doc believes it’s just a matter of conducting trials to discover a proper course of treatment. Far from civilization, his medical supplies might be limited…and yet, there might just be cause for hope. Or is hope the new madness?

The familiar faces: The other Jimmies include Erin Kellyman (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, The Green Knight) and Emma Laird (The Brutalist, A Haunting in Venice). Innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time include Gordon Alexander (one of Havoc‘s corrupt cops) and Louis Ashbourne Serkis, son of Andy and star of The Kid Who Would Be King.

And the final scene welcomes a recognizable special guest that entertainment headlines may have already spoiled for you. If not, then never mind! Forget I wrote anything.

The Impressions: With the Jimmies’ whiplash intro out of the way, their chaotic-evil romps are free to dominate the lethal wilderness surroundings, where they’re potentially more dangerous than the mind-wiped flesh-eaters lurking in nature’s corners. Sir Jimmy might be no smarter than the rest of them, but he showed the most initiative and therefore gets to dictate their rules and rituals, such as imposing on innocent families for meals and gruesome games of torture. Their savagery is more intense tougher to sit through than any of 28YL‘s zombie feedings, but DaCosta and Garland aren’t here just for the gross-outs: their demented unit is the found-family trope taken to its worst possible extreme — a tight clique self-raised in a sealed bubble with not nearly enough civil education or outside input to get the concepts of “right” and “wrong”. To them there’s only fun and not-fun, and one of those casually means inflicting agony on others.

British TV viewers of a certain age will get the subtext of the Jimmies’ inspiration more readily than us Americans who didn’t grow up on Top of the Pops and whatever else Jimmy Savile did to enchant their nation for decades…up until his death, whereupon their media and hundreds of victims finally stepped forward and told their repressed and suppressed horror stories of his crimes, which collectively make Harvey Weinstein look like a Gregorian monk. The Moral of the Story: choose your clique’s role models wisely, and don’t be shocked when you have to rethink your idolatry.

Amid all the savage Jimmying, Kellyman in particular stands out as the Doubting Thomas of the pack and the least beastly toward poor Spike, who shrinks back into such a dark corner than he cedes his 28YL main-character mantle to anyone else who’s willing to steal it. Serkis the younger, resembling a roughshod Tom Welling, puts in a formidable showing as the Jimmies’ most resistant prey despite some ugly mortal injuries. But the most surprising couple to watch here are Doc K and his pet monster, whose relationship goes to some really trippy places. It’s almost a shame to see their idyll end when the two half-films collide in the final act, when everything is literally set afire, the speakers are cranked to 11, the Jimmies have a reckoning and, yes, I wasn’t kidding about a dance number. It cannot be described, would make zero sense out of context if I tried to, and must be seen to be believed. I’ve never, ever seen Fiennes come more alive than he does here.

It all culminates in a showdown in that titular calcified sanctum that isn’t about bloodshed, or zombies, or who stabs the most and hardest. Yet another Garland screenplay has more in mind than mere genre trappings and DaCosta frightens us with existential conflicts between Satan and science, nihilism and decency, hedonism and hope. 28 Years Later was mostly fine as horror sequels go, but came nowhere near the level of aspirational audacity achieved here. 28DL crawled and 28YL walked so The Bone Temple could dance.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple end credits, which really should’ve ended with a statement to the effect of “THE SURVIVORS WILL RETURN IN 28 YEARS LATER: WILD BOYS NEVER LOSE IT.”