Detractors of Brüno would say that it’s crude and tasteless and defenders would say that it exposes society’s homophobia. Personally, I don’t think it does a great job of the latter but it excels at the former.

That’s not to say that there isn’t homophobia present in Brüno, but it’s mainly from the expected sources (drunk fight fans and rednecks) and Sacha Baron Cohen has to push the buttons really hard to get a reaction. For instance, he goes hunting with a bunch of hicks. From the start we know they’re contemptuous of him. You can see it in their eyes and body language, and you can hear it their voices. But they tolerate his presence. And sure they tolerate him more than they usually would because they’re being filmed but he has to literally take all his clothes off before they get angry with him. Somehow their reaction doesn’t surprise me.

Nor does it surprise me when a bunch of fight fans riot when they’re deceived into attending a gay make-out session. In this scene Bruno turns up as a supposed heterosexual fight promoter (he calls himself ‘Straight Dave’). He goes on and on about fighting and crazy drunken apes hoot and holler from the stalls, but then Bruno and a guy start making out and stripping. Cue bottles and chairs being flung into the ring. Again this homophobia isn’t particularly surprising. First of all, you’re in Alabama. Secondly, you’re at a cage fighting event. And thirdly, you’ve deceived a few hundred people. I’m not surprised that they’re going to riot. They’re Neanderthals that are only interested in blood, beer and boobs. Their homophobia is worn as a badge of honour.

So I don’t think that Brüno provides any shocking revelations about the American male. We already know that the uber alpha man ape despises homosexuality above everything else – to them the thought of having a throbbing cock thrust into their hallowed anus is more terrifying than a city being felled by a nuclear bomb. In these terms, Borat was more successful. In Borat there’s that wonderful scene where Borat is being a jerk at a Southern dinner party. His hosts tolerate him with polite befuddlement because he’s a weird foreigner, but then he has the nerve to bring a black woman to the table. Somehow this is worse than him bringing back his own shit in a bag and he’s made to leave. So even though the scene is crude, the racism is exposed in a very subtle way.

This being said, Brüno is more successful than Borat in one important way. It’s funnier.

By far the best set-piece is when Bruno shows his pilot TV programme to a bunch of middle-aged Americans. Vacuous and celebrity obsessed, the show is ridiculous. Bruno talks about foetuses and he ‘interviews’ Harrison Ford (who only has two words to say to the Austrian – ‘Fuck off!’), but most heinous of all, it includes lots of homoerotic narcissism. Cue lots of lingering crotch shots as Bruno gyrates in slow motion. But just when you think this is bad enough, there’s a bit where we see a close up of a large, flaccid penis twirling and wagging in the air. Round and round it goes like a fleshy chain watch that’s meant to hypnotise you. But you can almost see the focus group vomiting. And just when you think Cohen has pushed this as far as it will go, the penis stands up, says ‘Bruno!’ and the camera flies into the urethra. For me, the sequence was gut-achingly funny, but for the focus group it was appalling.

But does this mean that the people in the focus group are homophobes? Not at all. And it’s telling that the people in the focus group objected to the stupidity of the whole thing. So I don’t think that their reaction illustrates intolerance. It just shows unease. I’m sure these people have never had homosexuality rubbed under their noses in this manner before.

This begs the question, is Bruno offensive to the gay community? I can’t answer that question, seeing as I’m a macho manly man, but Bruno is so over the top and so far removed from reality that I can’t imagine anyone could take his portrayal seriously. Bruno is a gay man on gayroids. Everything he does revolves around sex. He’s kind of the nightmare image that some people must have of homosexual men – that all they do all day long is suck and fuck.

To illustrate this, there’s a hilarious sequence where Bruno and his lover have sex in increasingly bizarre ways. At one point his boyfriend, who’s sitting on an office chair with wheels, propels himself onto Bruno’s cock by using a fire extinguisher. And at another point, Bruno’s lover is twirled 360 degrees on Bruno’s dick like he’s a second hand on a clock. I imagine some bozos out there think this is normal sexual practice in the gay community.

An amusing bit of social commentary is when Bruno decides he has to be straight in order to be a celebrity. He points out how the most successful actors in Hollywood are all heterosexual – he uses Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kevin Spacey as examples. Even though we’re slowly becoming more accepting of homosexuality, many people still feel the need to hide their sexual orientation. We’ve made progress as a society, but we’re still short of where we should be.

The depiction of straight sex is also very funny in this film. The closest Bruno gets to having sex with a woman involves some plastic Amazon whipping and verbally abusing him. Here heterosexual sex is strange and terrifying. At least when he’s pouring champagne out of his lover’s anus they seem to be having fun.

If the film has a message then I guess it’s that we should be more accepting of one another – we shouldn’t have to hide who we really are. But I think that this film will fail to convince anyone sitting on the fence. Anyone who is appalled by homosexuality is only going to be more disgusted, so in your face are the depictions of sexual behaviour. But anyone who is savvy enough to understand how gloriously ridiculous Bruno is will have a great time watching his antics.

‘Ain’t it cool?’

No, not really. Broken Arrow is a dull, embarrassing action film only rendered somewhat watchable by John Travolta hamming his brains out. His performance here is unrestrained and crazy, and all the more entertaining for it. It’s a taste of what was to come in Face/Off.

‘Hush. Hush!’

Easily the best moment in the film is when Deakins (Travolta) kills Bob Gunton’s character. For scene after scene, Gunton, who’s been funding an operation to steal a nuclear bomb, keeps on ranting and raving about Deakins’ irresponsible behaviour. He doesn’t seem to realise that Deakins is a stone cold psychopath. He just keeps poking and prodding and moaning, thinking that his large wallet will be enough to garner the respect that will avoid murder death kill. What a mistake.

Gunton’s death occurs while he and Deakins are trying to outrun an upcoming nuclear explosion. Oh, and a helicopter gunship. Now in this case, seeing as Travolta has set a nuclear bomb to explode and as he’s attracted the attention of the military, you’d think that Gunton would be right to hand Deakins his ass. But Gunton is such a nag that you can’t help but think that he deserves it. His tone is like that of a shrill civil union partner. ‘Why have you chosen to detonate one of our nukes? Why have you let the military catch up to us? Why are you driving our Hummer so fast? Why haven’t you painted the gazebo yet? Why am I always the bottom?’

And so Gunton gets a torch smashed into his throat and he chokes to death. But as he gurgles his last gurgle, Travolta delivers the immortal line, ‘Hush. Hush!’ It’s hilariously delivered. It’s like Travolta is reprimanding the man for not having the decency to die quickly and quietly. Even when he’s croaking, Gunton has to shoot his mouth off.

In fact, this scene is so funny that when I saw it in isolation on YouTube a few months ago, I literally cried with laughed. Big fat tears rolled down my cheeks. My hysteria was such that my wife feared for my mental wellbeing. How to explain the things that tickle the centre of the funny bone?

‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a stand-off.’ [shoots man in the leg and rams his head into the dashboard] ‘No…we…don’t!’

Christian Slater’s hero is a bland dullard who doesn’t get to do dirty things with the girl and who spends lots of time getting beaten up by a lardy ham blob. About the only cool thing he gets to do or say is when he shoots a man in the leg and then berates him while ramming his head into the dashboard. Otherwise all Slater gets to do is have unconvincing fisticuffs with women and corpulent Scientologists.

An example of how bad the fights are is the scuffle between Slater and Travolta in the spy jet. Fair enough they’re kind of hampered by the situation – strapped into their seats – but it still ends up resembling something from an 80s Hulk Hogan wrestling match. At one point they lock up and it’s like you’re watching the Warrior and the Hulkster performing an excruciating test of strength. Thankfully, though, in this case, the test of strength only lasts for about ten seconds rather than the ten minutes you have to endure at Wrestlemania VI.

Once they’re freed from the constraints of sitting in seats, the actors are allowed full freedom to engage in bad martial arts. Sure it’s not quite Roger Moore bad (Judo chop! Stunt double kick!) but it’s not particularly elegant. It would have been much better if John Woo would have allowed his actors to engage in some street fighting rather than some mediocre chop-socky.

The gun fights, too, are somewhat disappointing, which is surprising seeing as this is a Woo film. But there’s nothing remarkable about them. The action only gets fun right at the end. I particularly enjoyed the bad guy falling to his death and screaming like a TIE Fighter. And Travolta’s death is hilarious. He gets penetrated by a nuclear bomb and then there’s a massive explosion. Orgasm, anyone?

Although Travolta does try earlier to get himself off. There’s a highly amusing scene where he molests the leading lady and gets her to punch a code into the nuclear bomb as he gropes her and repeatedly tells her to ‘Enter’. Quite what the subtext for this scene is, I don’t know. Does he merely want her to fondle his large warhead or does he want her to ‘enter’ him?

‘I say goddamn what a rush!’

Having dissed the film’s crappy action scenes, I will add one caveat. The film is rich with helicopter explosions and helicopter-related violence. One helicopter crashes because of the EMP generated by a nuclear blast and in the final sequence a man gets taken out by a rotor blade, which is a magnificent way to die in my opinion. But he doesn’t get beheaded. No, he gets chopped in the chest. [Chuckles]

‘What a terrible thing to say.’

However, the best thing about the film is the music. There’s a cool guitar riff that plays when Travolta enters a scene. It’s really much more than Deakins deserves. However, bizarrely, in one scene, when Travolta supposedly emerges from the dead, it sounds like some sort of lullaby is playing. It’s weird but I dig it. It’s one of the few rays of light in this piece of crap.

Baz Luhrmann is not a director I hold in high regard. All of his previous films have either annoyed the hell out of me or given me a blistering headache. He’s a director turned up to eleven, a director who believes more is more, a director who is the enemy of good taste. So colour me surprised when I found myself enjoying his latest offering.

Australia does not have a promising beginning. As is typical of Luhrmann, you’re bombarded with flashy visuals, quick editing and ridiculous acting. There’s a horrible sense of hysteria about the thing. Indeed, the exposition at the beginning is so rushed and so relentless that you feel like someone is shouting at you while slapping you in the face with a leather glove. Are you listening, the film is saying? Are you paying attention? Because I’ve got to get this tedious setting-up-the-story shit off my chest quick so that I can have some fun.

The hysterics extend to Nicole Kidman’s acting. She’s a talented actress but she has another side to her, a side that wants to paint with the broadest brush strokes. For the first hour or so this is the Kidman we get. The one with wild eyes, a shrill voice and exaggerated body movements. But then eventually she settles down and her performance improves considerably.

The problem with the beginning of the film is that it’s a broad comedy. Kidman enters the story as a prissy Englishwoman down under. And before you know it she’s getting hot under the collar about Hugh Jackman’s plan to mate horses and cooing like an idiot at kangaroos.

The kangaroo scene is a good example of just how awful the beginning is. Kidman’s character sees them out of the window of a van and dumbly admires their beauty. And then just as she’s cooing like a gibbering imbecile, one of Jackman’s pals shoots one and we’re confronted with a horrific close-up of Kidman’s grotesquely startled face. It’s exactly the kind of shit I expect from Luhrmann – childish, hysterical filmmaking.

The point at which I began to enjoy the film was when the characters entered the city of Darwin. Kidman’s acting had calmed down and there was little of the broad comedy that had tainted early scenes. Suddenly the film seemed almost comfortable in its own skin.

The first sequence in Darwin boasts some of the film’s best moments. There’s a lovely moment when Nullah, a mixed race child, watches The Wizard of Oz while wearing black face. He does this because it was the policy in Australia to separate mixed race children from their families so that the black could be ‘bred out of them’. This ingenious way of avoiding the authorities made me smile.

The sequence in Darwin is also where Kidman and Jackman fall in love. Previous to this, their relationship makes little impact whatsoever – Jackman is the typical Indiana Jones/Crocodile Dundee-style rogue with a heart of gold and Kidman is a boring toffee-nosed Limey. But in the sequence in Darwin, Jackman suddenly turns up all clean-shaven and looking every inch like James Bond. As a red-blooded, heterosexual male, even I’d be tempted by this hunk of a man.

The scenes in the rain where Jackman and Kidman first kiss are kind of reminiscent of David Lean. Sure Australia is nowhere near as good as a Lean film, but Jackman and Kidman have chemistry and the love scene is surprisingly sexy.

However, it seems to me that Luhrmann is far more enamored with Jackman than he is with his leading lady. Time after time we see lingering shots of Jackman’s toned physique. Indeed, in one of the opening scenes the director’s admiration is kind of ridiculous. As the characters camp in the Outback, there’s a slow-motion shot of a topless Jackman pouring water all over his chiseled body. No wonder Kidman gets so hot and bothered.

For me the film’s peak is a brief montage sequence after the events in Darwin where we see Fletcher feed his boss to the crocodiles. Previous to this Fletcher has been nothing more than a mealy-mouthed henchman to a ruthless cattle merchant. But in an instant Fletcher goes from being an annoying pissant to a cold-blooded psycho killer. And the sequence is perfectly filmed. There’s some wonderful voiceover from Nullah, there’s some great music and there are some fantastic visuals. It’s everything cinema should be – visually and aurally arresting without calling attention to itself.

My second favourite scene occurs after the Japanese attack Darwin. There’s a scene where Jackman wanders the devastated city and finds the bar where he first met Kidman. The music is perfect and there’s some echo-drenched voiceover from previous scenes. Again it’s surprisingly restrained cinema and subsequently has a pleasing emotional punch – Jackman thinks Kidman is dead and this is a nostalgia trip to stab himself in the heart with.

The scene at the bar also serves the film’s political point. At first the barman won’t serve Jackman’s friend, an aboriginal, but after some threats and some screaming, Jackman manages to get equal treatment for his friend. Jackman is a voice of reason in a society where racism and prejudice is always on the surface.

Nullah, the film’s narrator, is also a means for Luhrmann to assuage some of his country’s guilt. Here is a mixed race child who experiences the push/pull of wanting to be with his surrogate white family and with his aboriginal grandfather. The character says that he’s neither black nor white and therefore exists in some sort of no man’s land. But at the end of the film Luhrmann has the child choose his black grandfather over his white family. This seems to be an apology for the harm that the Australian authorities did and a way of illustrating how important it is to retain our cultures – the way that the authorities tried to breed the black out of children was cultural robbery pure and simple.

At the end King George (Nullah’s grandfather) says to his grandchild that this is their country. Yes Australia is their country but the way that he says it seems to be inclusive. Australia, for better or for worse, also belongs to the foreigners who settled there.

The ending notwithstanding, the final act of Australia is kind of a disappointment. It ends with a rather dull child rescue sequence. And the demise of Fletcher smacks of desperation (he gets speared by King George – it’s like Lurhmann doesn’t quite know how to get rid of his villain and so just decides to give him a soap opera death). But that being said, I was still pleasantly surprised by Australia. I found it highly entertaining.

The Golden Compass is a curious film. Based on a not very good novel, it’s neither faithful to the text nor does it try to drastically reinvent it. Instead the filmmakers just fiddle with the chronology of events here and there, omit key scenes and change a couple of the characters a little bit. I can’t imagine the result is satisfying for anyone.

Possibly the most puzzling thing is that the book’s final set piece (a fight between two giant polar bears) is moved to the middle of the film. It’s the most exciting piece of action in the novel and it’s also the emotional climax of the relationship between the young heroine Lyra and her polar bear pal Iorek Byrnison. In the book he travels days and days to rescue her from a rival polar bear King. It takes a while. But in the film he seemingly comes out of nowhere and the fight doesn’t have the high stakes that it should have. The point of travelling days and days to have a scrap with a fierce polar bear King is that he’ll be weak and tired when he finally arrives – he’ll be at a major disadvantage. But in the film you don’t see a journey. Therefore Byrnison just seems pathetic when he can’t put up much of a fight.

Moving the fight to the middle of the film and not showing the journey that Byrnison makes also means that you don’t see the love that he supposedly has for Lyra. In the book his sacrifice is highlighted in a much more successful way – he flirts with death to save her. Here he just risks getting beaten up a little – you never sense that he’s really in serious danger.

I also think that the casting for the voice of Byrnison is all wrong. The filmmakers cast Ian McKellen. Somehow an aged Englishman was not the voice I imagined for a fearsome polar bear. I imagined a coarser, fiercer, more youthful, more unrestrained voice. The filmmakers have obviously tried to hire as many names as they can.

This desire to hire star names extends to having Daniel Craig turn up for a few minutes and for such luminaries as Christopher Lee, Tom Courtenay and Derek Jacobi to play thankless minor roles. As such, the talent on display and the total waste of that talent is another nail in the coffin of this film.

While moving the polar bear fight is the most puzzling decision, changing the ending proves to be the most foolish. In the book, Lord Asriel (played by Daniel Craig), who is obsessed with a material called ‘Dust’, sacrifices a child and moves to a parallel world. It’s kind of silly but at least it packs a punch. In the movie, though, this doesn’t happen at all. The movie ends with Lyra having a conversation with the child who’s going to get sacrificed. It’s incredibly anti-climatic and comes out of the blue. When the screen faded to black, I didn’t quite believe that this was it. Surely there was more. But there wasn’t. Presumably the end of the novel, which is a cliffhanger, was going to form the basis of the beginning of the sequel. But because this film is so bad that sequel may never happen, which makes the ending of the movie version seem even more ridiculous.

I’d be quite interested in hearing what those who have only seen the movie think about the plot. To me, I think the film must be pretty incomprehensible. The concept of ‘Dust’ and daemons aren’t explained particularly well and events seemingly happen at random – the movie doesn’t flow at all; it’s one of the most stilted movies I’ve seen.

But we are given a brief explanation. Dust, this mysterious matter that can be viewed in certain types of photographs, is supposedly original sin. However, this Dust doesn’t form until children hit puberty. Therefore the shadowy religious organisation in the film wants to find a way of preventing Dust from forming so that it can keep people good and pure. To do this, they try and separate children from their ‘daemons’ (every person has an animal daemon/spirit that follows them around). And this daemon is basically a physical embodiment of an individual’s soul. So by separating a child from its daemon, the church is basically trying to perform spiritual castration.

All of this is interesting stuff, but while the idea doesn’t quite work in Pullman’s book, it’s even less successful in the movie. In the book the concepts seem clunky and a little confusing, but here they’re hardly explained at all.

The focus instead, as you can imagine, is on action set-pieces and special effects. And while the action and the effects are fine, they aren’t enough. They certainly can’t hide the clunky writing – none of the dialogue is there to build character; all of it just moves the story along. The script is sterile and exposition filled.

The screenplay also makes Lyra far less heroic. In the book, she’s captured by ‘Gobblers’ (child snatchers who perform daemon-separating experiments for the church) and then pro-actively leads an escape. In the movie, though, she doesn’t start a revolt – she just makes the facility blow up. To me this seems more like Arnold Schwarzenegger shit.

And speaking of Gobblers, they’re handled very poorly in the movie. In the book they’re these scary, faceless monsters that steal children for unknown reasons. But in the movie their true nature is revealed very quickly and they subsequently have none of the creep factor.

But then this goes for the movie entire. Nothing is allowed to develop. Nothing is allowed to build. You just have exposition-heavy scene followed by exposition-heavy scene with some action smattered in-between. It’s a deeply unsatisfying experience.

I can remember watching a Channel 4 documentary a few years back about new age soldiers who would stare at goats and hang weights from their genitals. The staring was supposed to kill the subject they were staring at but I’m not sure what the weights did. Regardless, the documentary was very amusing and had a complete ‘what the fuck?’ aspect to it. It was hard to fathom that the military would allow a bunch of hippie soldiers to do all of these wacky things.

However, I quickly forgot about the program and it was consigned to the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind. But then one day I saw a trailer for a new film called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Suddenly it all came flooding back: the Jedi-hippie-samurai-warrior monks who spend their time taking acid and hanging weights from their genitals. I had to see the movie.

It would be kind of hard to fuck up a movie like this. The subject matter is just so silly. And to be fair, the filmmakers do a decent job. The film is well acted and very funny. But at the same time it’s nothing more than a fluff piece. There’s a tiny bit of commentary on Iraq and how corporations are carving it up instead of nations, but most of the film is gag driven. Which is fair enough – the film is very funny – but you aren’t really given the bigger picture. I wanted to know more about the climate of fear during the Cold War that allowed this very peculiar brand of craziness to flourish.

In general it’s the flashback sequences that I found the funniest. There’s a hilarious bit where George Clooney’s character joins the New Earth Army. He’s told to dance. At first he’s kind of stiff but then he loosens up, gets a goofy look on his face and begins to go crazy. It’s just fun to see Clooney let his hair down and it’s obvious that he’s having a great time.

This scene has another moment that had me cracking up. There’s a flashback to Clooney’s character as a child. We see why he’s so reluctant to dance. You see, the kid loves to dance to pop music but his father doesn’t approve. In fact, in the scene, the father, upon seeing his son dancing in a very feminine fashion, throws something at him and tells him to stop acting like a ‘queer’. It’s a very harsh moment, and it didn’t actually get many laughs in the theatre, but I was cracking up. The kid, the music and the timing are all perfect.

I was also highly amused by some of the horrific experiments that the army got up to. There’s a bit where the military want to know if a cat can telepathically tell whether its kitten is in danger. So we see a scientist about to stub out a cigarette on a kitten’s face. It’s horrific to think about, but the pathetic meow that the cat makes and the absurdity of the experiment make it blackly funny.

There’s a Dr Strangelove element to all of this. We find out that some of the experiments into telepathy and psychic phenomena are inspired by gossip, rumour mongering and hoaxes. The Soviets and the Americans both get into this nonsense because they fear that the other side will have some success with it.

Sadly most of this information is dwelt on for just for a few moments. The vast majority of the film focuses on the relationship between a reporter, played by Ewan McGregor, and an aging soldier, played by George Clooney. Yes their journey is consistently amusing, but it can’t disguise a rather moribund story.

It takes a while to learn why Clooney’s character wants to go to Iraq, and when we do find out, it lands with a dull thud. The wraparound story and the finale are the least interesting things in the film.

One of the film’s biggest selling points is its cast, and most of them do an excellent job. George Clooney, in particular, is excellent. As is Jeff Bridges, who basically reprises the role of The Dude. Ewan McGregor, on the other hand, lets himself down with his American accent. As my wife pointed out, it just sounds like a monotonous drone, which is a shame, as McGregor’s comic timing is excellent – he and Clooney work well together.

A bit of a head scratcher, though, is Kevin Spacey. Yes the man is funny but he seems to be making a career out of bit parts. I’m not saying that the role is beneath him, but it’s disappointing that he seems to be choosing ‘easy’ roles. It seems his film career is a brief holiday from his theatre duties at the Old Vic. He isn’t taking many risks.

Despite this, Spacey still contributes a couple of the film’s funniest moments. One scene in particular that I liked was when he makes a soldier take LSD and then bombards him with flashing lights until he goes mad. I also liked it when Spacey himself unknowingly takes LSD and contemplates blowing his brains out. He thinks about it for a second and then suddenly announces that he’s hungry. It’s both enjoyable and a letdown to see Spacey in these roles – he’s a funny guy but with films like Superman Returns and 21 he’s been punching under his weight for the last few years.

And that’s what the film does. It punches under its weight. With a bit more context it could have been a memorable satire. As it is, it’s just a funny, silly, forgettable movie. It’ll probably stay with me as long as the Channel 4 documentary that I watched all those years back.

The opening scene of 28 Days Later shows a bunch of animal rights activists breaking into a laboratory. At first the lab seems pretty ordinary. There are caged animals, there’s a weasely scientist and undoubtedly there are some lousy coffee-making facilities. But then we find out that a bunch of chimps are infected with ‘rage’.

As is customary for a bunch of sallow, undernourished Morrissey fans, they lose all sense of reason and decide to free the animals. But then rather than hug its liberator, a deranged chimp decides to leap on the person’s face. Somehow I doubt this fitted with the activists’ plan. They probably foresaw hugs of gratitude, a stroll down the High Street to weep at the inhumanity swinging in the windows of butcher’s shops and a special playing of Bona Drag. They never thought they’d be meat for the apes.

But how apt is it to have animal rights activists bringing about the end of the world? I mean, if it’s not the mink ravaging the countryside, it’s the apocalypse. These lettuce-eating, people-loathing humanoids will press the self-destruct button with their knuckleheaded do-goodery gone do-badery long before the jihadists and neo-conservatives get their shit together.

An unfortunate survivor of the disaster is Jim, a bicycle courier. He awakens in a deserted hospital, unaware that virtually everyone around him has been consumed by a horrible virus.

One puzzling aspect of Jim’s survival is that he’s left naked in a hospital room. Since when is that standard hospital procedure? When do they leave you stark bollock naked? But then I guess that’s socialised health care for you. There’s no money for the little extras like hospital gowns.

But I guess Jim’s nakedness is meant to symbolise his rebirth in this new world and his vulnerability in it. For a brief time he will be a helpless innocent – he’s going to have to relearn everything he knows.

Much has been made of the opening sequence where Jim walks around a deserted London, but as enjoyable and wonderful as it is, it’s not really that creepy. I’m sure most Londoners have roamed the streets early one Sunday and have seen how deserted the city can be. If you go to certain parts, you literally won’t see anyone. And so therefore the sequence doesn’t quite have the creepy novelty factor that it aims for – I’m sure Londoners staggering back from a night club early in the morning have seen the quiet and the mess that Jim encounters.

All that being said, it is wonderful to see London filmed with such skill and verve. Somehow 28 Days Later manages to take most of the clichés of filming in the Greatest City in the World (buses, parliament, Piccadilly Circus) and turn them on their head. We see a bus turned over on its side, parliament looks over a ghost town and Piccadilly Circus has become a home to missing persons flyers. It’s nice to see someone doing something different with the city.

One of the disappointing aspects of the London sequence is that it has to end. All too soon Jim stumbles upon a couple of survivors and the story kicks into gear. I think the film could have sustained a bit more of Jim’s loneliness. Thankfully, though, the film doesn’t collapse like I Am Legend when other people turn up.

That’s not to say that the script is anything special. In fact, in several instances, the film succeeds despite the script. This is especially true when Jim hooks up with the survivors. The exposition is pretty clunky.

However, even the acting can leave a lot to be desired at times. Cillian Murphy is excellent as Jim, and Brendan Gleeson is excellent as always, but the girl who plays Hannah is pretty awful. Her line delivery is consistently atrocious. I also think that Naomie Harris isn’t particularly great. She has the intensity that her role requires but she doesn’t necessarily have the acting chops – her performance doesn’t always feel particularly natural. Harris is obviously trying hard but she isn’t always succeeding.

Some of the soldiers, too, aren’t particularly great. There’s a dweeby private who seems to be touched in the head (the character is far too buffoonish – when he gets stabbed in the chest his eyes bulge out of his head like he’s a cartoon character) and there’s a cockney who is incredibly exaggerated – he’s like an EastEnders character on crack. Having said that, the cockney is so atrocious and so vile and so over the top that his death is incredibly satisfying – Jim literally buries his fingers in his head.

But while some of the acting and some of the writing disappoint, the direction is always a joy. The film has a very dirty, gritty feel to it. The digital cameras totally take the sheen off the picture. But at the same time the energy Boyle brings to the film ensures that it’s incredibly cinematic. The film feels a lot more expensive than it is.

The action set pieces also impress. They all have lots of tension and excitement. And this is made even more remarkable by some of the bad writing that brings them about. For instance, there’s a sequence where the characters get a flat tire in a tunnel. Before driving into the tunnel Jim says that it’s a shit idea for them to take this route, and he turns out to be right. But even though Alex Garland tries to write himself out of the situation by making Jim self-aware, it doesn’t stop the sequence from being highly contrived.

Another contrived sequence is when Jim wanders off from the group into an empty building. It’s a terribly hackneyed way of building a shock, but somehow, because Boyle is making the film, it still manages to work.

The final act of 28 Days Later has been criticised in some quarters. People who love the beginning see it as anti-climatic. But I think that the final third works pretty well. Sure some of the acting is lacking, but the banality of the soldiers’ evil seems correct – given the end of the world, they’re desperate for pussy. And it’s fun to have the infected run riot in the soldiers’ base and kill everyone. It kind of becomes a black comedy in the end.

However, as enjoyable as the final action set-piece is, you still have to put up with a huge flight of fancy. The bit I’m talking about is when Jim manages to climb over a wall with barbed wire on top of it with both of his hands bound. How the hell did he manage that? Somehow he becomes an Irish Superman.

But in the end Jim actually becomes more like the infected. He ends up killing people with his bare hands in a murderous rampage. As always in ‘zombie’ films, the zombies are the underclass – they’re loathed, they’re mocked and they’re figures of fun (the soldiers keep an infected person chained up and take pleasure in mocking him – it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that he’s black). So in the end we’re almost asked to empathise with the infected. As violent and as base as they are, their actions are at least not premeditated. Their evil isn’t based on whims or prejudice. They’re slaves to their senseless bloodlust. Ordinary people on the other hand should know better. They should be rallying together. And so therefore the final triumph of Jim, Selena and Hannah is a victory for decency – the thing that will get us through hard times is belief in the family unit; no matter how hard things get we must always have the strength to think and feel.