HOWZAT?!

The highlight of Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is undoubtedly Jack O’Connell’s gnarly-toothed turn as Sir Jimmy Crystal, cult leader to a tracksuit-clad gang of feral British youths. Raised on a diet of Teletubbies, Power Rangers and Satanism, Crystal and his hunting pack roam the zombie landscape of the mainland, fending for themselves and steeling themselves against the adversity of the environment they have been surviving in since childhood.

I certainly can’t remember a more sublime pantomime villain on screen in recent memory than O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy, with his skin-crawling Fife accent and pallid, uneasy presence that is somehow both seductive and creepy in equal measure. With his greasy blond locks and bejewelled hands, decorated with tacky rings, as well as an upside-down crucifix necklace that hangs halfway down his velvet tracksuit top, it was a clever idea to build upon the imagery of the great Satan himself, Sir Jimmy Savile, as inspiration for the look and feel of this lost-boy leader and his zombie-killing droogs.

It’s a real shame, then, that the film and its themes are so ham-fisted and laden with excessive exposition. There was something better to be done here, but Danny Boyle’s depressing influence, with his predictable boomer-truth tropes reminiscent of the icky vibes of his 2012 Olympic ceremony, punctures any opportunity for the film to be truly dynamic or Kubrick-cool.

However, even with many reservations about Da Costa's film, which ultimately is mostly schlocky horror slop, I will remember O’Connell’s performance as one of greatness, simply because he captures the sickly vibes of a cult leader as well as I've ever seen, where grooming, initiation, and dodgy parables go hand in hand, and where an atmosphere of discarded cans of Tizer and Lucozade orange cellophane permeates the retro introverted vibes of the character and his lost-in-time feel.