This ambitious low-budget British zombie movie from writer-director Chee Keong Cheung turns up a few new ideas — the infected here are the usual frothing, entrails-gobbling zombies, but start to show malign intelligence and even organise into armies to fight regular people. However, the theme gets lost in a choppily-scripted, wildly-overlong effort that’s stuck with stick figure characters and a story that keeps almost winding down but then dragging on.
Cheung’s previous films (Underground, Bodyguard: A New Beginning) were heavy on brutal martial arts action and this runs to a great deal of thumping. The squaddie heroes have only three days to find the cure to a zombie apocalypse but spend as much time beating each other up in stupid quarrels as they do clashing with the undead. A toothless Eastern European gang leader (Douglas Russell) pops up with skull-painted goons for regular action movie battles whenever the zombies run out. The multi-national platoon of tooled-up grunts keep pausing for flashback montages, often showing scenes that we first saw barely five minutes earlier, and elegiac music plays whenever anyone with a name gets killed — though one major character’s death scene unaccountably doesn’t make the final cut, leaving a notable hole in continuity.
Obviously, it would like to remind audiences of the 28 Days/Weeks Later films, but a late-developing plot involving a schoolgirl who attaches herself to the gruff Captain is a riff on the more recent The Girl With All The Gifts. It’s obviously nowhere near their level of quality, and scarcely even matches the direct-to-DVD Zombie Diaries films. Weariness sets in well before the onscreen counter ticks down to a damp squib of an apocalyptic finish.