The trailer for Doomsday ripped off… I mean, paid homage to several movies: Escape From New York, all of the Mad Max films and 28 Days Later [and its sequel] among them. The actual movie adds more than a few more such referential scenes – but not out of lack of imagination. Instead, we get a movie that does for plague pics what director Neil Marshall’s earlier Dog soldiers did for werewolf movies.
Simple set up – a plague ravages Scotland so the government builds a wall around it and leaves the Scots to live or die on their own. Thirty-five years later, the plague breaks out in London. Satellites now show people living in the streets of Glasgow.
Now, one of the few Scots to have made it to England before the wall closed, Captain Eden Sinclair [Rhona Mitra, channelling a mix of Kate Beckinsale’s Death Dealer, Selene, and Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft] is put in charge of a mission to find the elusive cure. This will, it says here, make a hero of the current Prime Minister [Alexander Siddig] at the same time it saves lives.
They have forty-three hours.
Doomsday is a kinetic freak show of action, mayhem and weirdness. Neil Marshall has, it seems, distilled every post-apocalyptic and/or plague and/or disaster film into a hundred minutes [there are almost five minutes of closing credits]. As Sinclair and her team find out almost immediately, two tanks are little more than sitting for the Mad Max-ish Sol [Craig Conway] and his merry band of tattooed cannibals.
Then there’s the former Dr. Kane [Malcolm McDowell] who was working on a cure at the time the wall went up and Scotland was left to die. Turns out there is no cure – just a bunch of immune people, doing whatever it takes to get by. In Kane’s case, it’s a medieval castle replete with tattered, but well-armored executioners and Robin Hood-esque archers. It’s a bit more civilized than sol’s followers, but not a lot.
Marshall ties the nearly dead Scotland together by introducing Kane’s runaway daughter, Cally [MyAnna Buring], and further tying the two to Sol. The result makes the term dysfunctional family so inadequate that it drifts away into meaninglessness.
Of course, there are villains on both sides of the wall – in London, that would be Michael Canaris [David O‘Hara], the man behind the PM’s success. From the moment he first opens his mouth, he reads as a power-hungry double-crosser – but in keeping with the atmosphere Marshall has constructed here, he lacks wit or style. Those qualities are embodied by Kane – and probably no one else, excepting, possibly, Sinclair’s boss, Chief of Police Bill Nelson [Bob Hoskins].
Doomsday’s tagline is “Mankind has an expiration date.” Marshall, who also wrote the script, has a love for the genres he’s mashing up here [a scene in which Sinclair fights Kane’s heavily armoured and well armed executioner calls to mind everything from John Boorman’s Excalibur to George A. Romero’s Knightriders].
Here, Marshall has created a movie that might well have something to say about the direction in which our society is heading, but what he’s mostly doing is having fun. Read into Doomsday whatever you like – just don’t forget to enjoy its wonky, nasty fun.
Final Grade: B