Movies

There’s something almost touching, almost, about a movie so desperate to wrap itself in the gravitas of “true crime” mythology that it ends up draped in wet, mildewed football scarves. “Rise of the Footsoldier” is less a film than a brute-force memory dump, a feverish scrapbook of loutish glory so in love with its subject that it never pauses to consider whether anyone else could possibly care. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you force-fed a biopic to a slot machine, pulling the lever every time someone gets bottled or called a four-letter word, look no further.

Has any horror film ever been sabotaged quite so thoroughly by its own intelligence (or rather, the conspicuous lack thereof) as 28 Weeks Later? The film begins with such ruthless, pulse-jacking precision, Danny Boyle’s kinetic ghost lingering over the savage, merciless prologue, that for a few brief, breathless minutes one feels the rare thrill of a sequel that might justify its own existence. That opening, with its madcap flight through a cottage-turned-meat-grinder and the image of Don (Robert Carlyle, desperately scraping together a character out of animal panic) abandoning his wife to the horde, one of the finest acts of cinematic cowardice, played for eyeball-widening horror and not, as is depressingly common, for laughs. As Don paddles away across the nightmare water, you even ask yourself: would I do the same? The movie dares you to admit it.