In the world of moviegoing, there are a few things that, while not necessarily universal rules, are standards that are very close to infallible.  Things such as:

-Films based on old TV shows areabout half as good at best of the show they come from.

-A horror film rated PG or PG-13 is not very good. 

-Romantic comedies aren’t actually funny.

-Just as it was with Peter Sellers before him, the only way Jim Carrey will ever get an Oscar is if he steals one of Jack Nicholson’s.

-Remakes are never as good as the original film.

And of all these semi-rules, they most solid of them all is, of course:

-Sequels always suck.

It is simply stupefying how tried and true this is.  I’m surprised anyone even tries to make sequels anymore.  They try to sneak them off to audiences, of course, by playing with the titles and avoiding the dreaded 2 or fancier II in the title.  But they are generally bad.  Some of them miserably so.  Think of Smokey and the Bandit II.  Blair Witch 2.  Conan the Destroyer.  Speed 2.  Ghost Busters 2.  Or what I see as the ultimate lousy sequel, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.  I actually believe every sequel made should be required by law to have the secondary title Electric Boogaloo.  Write your congressmen.  Maybe we can get this done.

Not all sequels suck, of course.  The French Connection II is pretty good.  So is Rocky II.  Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan is actually considered by some better than the first one, although I like them both differently.  But these films are really few and far between.  Highlander 2, a film so bad it reaches Ed Wood territory, is more likely what you’ll get with sequels.

Sequels are rarely if ever about making a good film that stands alone as a quality piece of work like all films should be.  Sequels are more about perpetuating or creating a franchise.  The stories are not as tight, and any sense of originality is much less likely than usual when the premise is on the second go-round.  A lot of them have those tiresome ‘gettin’ the band back together’ moments, the rehashing of gags and clichéd catch-phrases from the first one, and let’s not omit the gratuitous and unnecessary special effects that they often couldn’t afford in the first, commonly smaller budgeted film, that they just have to get into the sequel now that they have more money to play with.

It’s sad, really, especially when the first one is a film that is close to your heart.  You’d love it if they could manage to make Caddyshack 2 even half as good as the original.  But we all saw what happened when they tried.  Such exploits seem doomed to failure almost every time.  Which I suppose is what happens when you try to catch lightning in the same bottle twice.

That’s pretty much what I had in my head when I went to see 28 Weeks Later, the sequel 28 Days Later, one of the best horror films of the last decade or so.  Watching the trailer, I could readily see before sitting in the theater that 28 Weeks had a few tell tale signs of a bad sequel.  Like having a bigger budget to go around blowing more shit up (never mind that the small budget style is what made the first one so great).  More worrisome than that, Danny Boyle was not in the director’s chair for this one.  That I saw as the ultimate kiss of death for 28 Weeks.  It’s no knock intended on Jaun Calos Fresnadillo, the man at the helm of this one.  He’s got talent of his own.  But Danny Boyle has such a singular style that was key in the success of 28 Days that I felt that for anyone who’s not Danny Boyle this one would be like directing a film with a potato sack over your head the whole time.

But you know, I gave the film a chance, and I am really glad I did.  This is actually not a bad film.  It was damn good, even.  Not at the same level as 28 Days, and maybe not quite as good as Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, as sequels go, but it was definitely a lot better than I had anticipated. 

The film takes place, as the title suggests, 28 weeks after the rage virus has wiped out the entire British island.  All the infected have long since died off of starvation, and the U.S. military is in the process of repatriating survivors and others who were not in England during the outbreak back into the heart of a deserted London.  It’s apparently a happy time of optimism and promise for the survivors, never mind the ghosts of 60 million all around you and snipers on each rooftop of the nice and new apartment complex you’re essentially imprisoned in.  But things, like I said, are apparently looking up.  The virus is gone, and all the danger has passed.  Which of course is when everything goes catastrophically wrong, chaos ensues, and the infected blood starts flying around like confetti.

I was really impressed with this film.  I left the theater after feeling really numb, and that always happens when I know I’ve seen something pretty damn special.  The way the film is able to go from calm, sometimes even peaceful moments to sudden sheer intensity from out of nowhere was amazing, a motif I was so happy to see they were able to bring over from the first film successfully.  Fresnadillo actually did it better than Boyle did.  Danny Boyle’s films tend to get this feeling sometimes of being a collection of music videos strung together loosely by a storyline.  In this film Fresnadillo made everything feel much more connected and coherent. 

Which is a tall task, especially when considering what I thought was really the major downside of this film, which was the story itself.  It was a good idea, and probably what was the best possible approach to a sequel of 28 Days, but the writing was not very well thought out in far too many ways.  I thought it opened somewhat weakly, as if in a hurry to get to the action.  A little time to sit and contemplate the ideas being bandied about by the premise would have been nice before everything started off to hell.  But that’s a problem I have with a lot of films these days, the way they not so much examine deep thematic ideas of the story as point at them quickly before running off to show some full frontal.

But worse than that, there were far too many plot holes and implausible aspects in the middle of the story.  With horror films you tend to get a little more leeway with your suspension of disbelief, but not this much.  The simple fact that you’re repopulating the island only 28 weeks after the rage virus is unleashed is one thing, but how in the name of God do you let civilians set foot on the island again without a healthy and island wide scorched earth policy, to make absolutely, irrefutably sure the virus is gone first?  And where exactly are you finding survivors stupid enough to actually want to go back anyway?  If I’d survived the hell of the first film there’s no way I’d get closer to England than Reykjavik. 

But okay, fine, if that was the only problem I had with the story, I could live.  I suppose arguments could be made as to why they didn’t level London and all those hiding places and such before repopulating.  But that’s just the first implausible aspect of this story.  And I’m not talking about the inconsistencies that you realize about a film when thinking about it on the way home from the theater, or the next day.  These were problems with the story that I saw as I watched it unfold on the screen.  Real big, glaring problems.  I won’t say what they were, because I wouldn’t want to give anything about the film away, but they are there.  Let’s just say that for a military command, their sense of security was absolutely godawful in so many ways.

Usually story problems like the above drive me up the friggin wall in films, especially considering how easily just about all of them could be fixed.  A line of dialogue here, a thirty second scene there is all it sometimes takes.  Just one more draft of the script, one less idiot producer trying to justify their existence with moronic notes on the story.  All they would have needed to do was spend a little more than 28 weeks on the story and it would have been so much better.

But for some reason, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, the plot holes really didn’t bother me in this film, even as the story problems were some of the bigger ones I have seen in some time.  I can’t exactly say why.  It could be the acting, which is very good throughout, from Robert Carslyle on down.  But I think it has a lot more to do with the work of Fresnadillo, who took what is essentially a fairly flawed script and got way more out of it than really should be possible.  Granted, as the director he’s not blameless in not fixing a lot of the story problems, and he did get what I suspect was probably an obligatory writing credit, but at least his surehanded work everywhere else probably saved this film from total ruin.  It probably and hopefully will not be the best film he ever does, but he sure has a lot to be proud of with this one.

All in all, I say this is definitely a film I would recommend.  It overcomes its shortcomings well, and has enough good things in it to make it well worth watching.  Especially if you consider it might very well be the last good sequel to anything you’re likely to see for at least a decade or so.