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British writer/director Neil Marshall caught the eye of many a horror hound with his 2002 release of Dog Soldiers; a nice incursion into the werewolf subgenre. In 2005, his highly extolled follow up The Descent, about a deadly horde of mutated cave dwellers, gave Marshall the credibility to trump the often associated horror stigma; instead earning the regard as a top flight filmmaker, not only in his native U.K., but in Hollywood as well. Now Marshall tackles his most ambitious, mainstream effort in Doomsday; an over the top action spectacle about a post-apocalyptic dystopia set in the not so distant future.

Gloomsday
The picture opens with an alarming screed where a man named Kane (Malcolm McDowell) explains the ruinous future of the U.K. A single microscopic organism has mutated into a virus, spreading all throughout Glasgow, Scotland and soon to be London. The British army builds a thirty-foot armored wall around the city as means of quarantining the infected. No one in, no one out! Cut to 2035, where the "hot zone" (the quarantined area) has been ravaged by looting, raping, murder, all around anarchy. We meet Prime Minister John Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) and his partner Michael Canaris (David O'Hara), as well as their underling Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins); all of which convene around a table to discuss the possibility of a cure. Nelson is given 48 hours to obtain and implement a cure to those infected. So who does he turn to? Our bad ass heroine Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra); a sexy, tough as nails, no non-sense government agent!

Once infiltrating the hot zone with a harem of hi-tech armor and arsenal, Sinclair and her team mow down as many infected predators as they can. See, they've degenerated into punker cannibal misfits, somewhat resembling your typical zombie, lusting after fresh blood. Soon, Sinclair is captured; she goes through a series of high octane obstacles and fight scenes until she meets Kane face to face. We discover there is no cure for the infected, that only the blood of immune survivors could be used for a vaccine. Sinclair does all she can to deliver uninfected, immune survivors to Canaris, but he has his own nefarious political agenda. But enough of the plot, this movie is a fu**in' blood bath. No bones about it. Well, cracked and dismantled bones, maybe. Seriously, this thing feels like Die Hard 2 on steroids or HGH. I lost count of excoriated limbs and hacked off body parts; the violence so exorbitant and over the top that any of it is hard to be taken gravely. At one point, a man is charred alive, his smoking head cut off, his cooked body devoured by hungry mutants. Nice, right?!?

All Days Must End
Doomsday is purely action spectacle. Sure it has some horrific elements, some campy humor, and some sci-fi fodder; but at its core...it remains an action flick. An unoriginal one at that! Beyond its own slight stylistic deviation, the film is a mere simulacram of all that came before it. You'll hear comparisons to films like 28 Days Later and Mad Max, and in terms of tone, there might be a bit of truth to that (there's a pretty gnarly car chase). But I saw more alignment with films like Gladiator and Lethal Weapon, where exact scenes appear to be lifted and rehashed with different characters and settings. Take Sinclair's torture scene for example, cuffed and hung by her wrists and beaten for information (Riggs, anyone?). Then she battles an armor attired, 6'7" dude with a huge mace in a Romanesque courtyard...she spikes the dude in the top of his head, blood jets from his eye. Oh, and then there's the Pulp Fiction leather bound gimp, who comically reappears in the most random of scenarios. The film is a hyper amalgam of tired, trampled pop sequences; just flared up with a bit more gratuitous violence.

The action in Doomsday is relentless. Really, it never lets up; so much so that you actually want it to slow down just so you can well, forget breathing, I just wanted to blink. Such a bombardment of images and rapid cutaways leaves you with a numbing effect; much of it just washing right over you in a way that deprives you of any emotional resonance or sympathy for the characters to which these awful things are happening. But sympathy is hardly what the director is after, I'd imagine. This is an adrenaline fueled thrill ride, nothing more. And to that end, I think it succeeds, albeit adding nothing new or really exciting to the mix. If a gory, big budget Hollywood action spectacle is your type of brandy, this one is for you. If you're expecting a legitimate horror flick, you might want to skip it.

Terror Rating: 1 out of 5
Originality: 1 out of 5
Level of Gore: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5

Recommendations: 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later

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