28 Years Later The Bone Temple movie review: If 28 Years Later which came out last year was startling in its visual imagination, its cinematic leaps and its sublime use of Ralph Fiennes’s talent, this second part is more contained and less ambitious. But as a placeholder for another sequel, The Bone Temple is just the right amount of modest — taking the story forward and giving its characters a developmental arc.
Danny Boyle has taken a backseat for this one, handing over the directing reins to Nia DaCosta, with the rest of the behind-the-scenes team almost the same.
The last film left us restless in anticipation of what was to follow for the boy called Spike (Williams), who had survived being attacked and falling into the ranks of “the infected” or zombies by the skin of his teeth. The ones who came between Spike and those chasing him then were a gang of Clockwork Orange-like maniacal youngsters, led by a magnetic “Sir Jimmy Crystal” (O’Connell).
Modelled after Jimmy Saville, Sir Jimmy is dripping in jewellery (including a gold tooth) and his posse of men and women are all called Jimmy or Jimmima. In The Bone Temple, a frightened and lonely Spike has been inducted into the gang too, as the youngest Jimmy.
There is much more blood, a lot of gore, and quite a bit of Satanic hocus pocus in The Bone Temple. All of it involves Sir Jimmy. Some is intentional as the delusional O’Connell struggles to keep track of his own incoherence. However, it goes on for far too long for a film whose strength is not the talking, but the dispensing with it.
Again, as long as Fiennes occupies the screen as Dr Ian Kelson — who has survived the infected for 28 years by keeping his wits, books on medicine, and bottles and bottles of morphine and iodine about — The Bone Temple is at its most powerful.
Just watch him switch between his interactions with an infected alpha male he has befriended and named Samson (Lewis-Parry), and his encounter with the madness of Sir Jimmy. Fiennes’s performance to The Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is breathtaking, a Dumbledore who could be a Voldemort; or is it the other way around? Even those in on the act may doubt themselves.
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If Williams has less to do than the earlier 28 Years Later, the role of the wounded misfit here is played to equal parts gentleness and ferocity by Kellyman.
The Bone Temple ends with a pleasing surprise for the fans of this series, and on the note of optimism that had existed post-World War II. The world believed then that it had put ideas such as populism, fascism, nationalism behind for good.
There is always the next film that may revise that.
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28 Years Later The Bone Temple movie director: Nia DaCosta
28 Years Later The Bone Temple movie cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry
28 Years Later The Bone Temple movie rating: 3 stars
