DOOMSDAY

Doomsday is the third film from Neil Marshall, who has previously served up the rather good DESCENT, and the rather overrated DOG SOLDIERS. Doomsday was not so hot. The plot being that England has erected a kind of futuristic Hadrian’s Wall in order to keep the rabid Scotch at bay, having become infected with a deadly plague. It’s essentially stealing ideas left, right and centre from 28 Days Later.

The first half an hour or so was excellent fun. No lie. Really hokey, violent, badly acted sci fi. But in a good way. Owed a HUGE debt to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK - the heroine even had an EYEPATCH for Christ’s sake – in my book, if you’re gonna rip something off you can’t get much better than Escape From New York. 

Speaking of Escape From New York, the upcoming remake is frankly an idea based upon gargantuan idiocy. What are they hoping to achieve?  With their very best, most superhuman effort, they may be able to manage a movie ON PAR with the original. But it is impossible to surpass it. In fact, if it is as bad as I suspect, I shall have to travel to the Americas with the express purpose of kicking John Carpenter in the junk.

But I digress back to DOOMSDAY. Even Bob Hoskins playing Mr Cockney Stereotype couldn’t foul up the start. The only thing missing from his portrayal was a suit covered in buttons and a comment about how the ‘Krays sorted out London’. Otherwise every cockney box was ticked.

Unfortunately after such a promising start it couldn’t decide what film it was trying to be, and rapidly went downhill after it decided to go a bit primitive and medieval, only to later change its mind AGAIN and backtrack into cod Mad Max territory. NOTE: First two Mad Max films are perfect. If you try and rip them off you’re just going to end up looking like a right plum. This film is a case in point.

Also both principal hero and villain didn’t really have the chops for it. Rhona Mitra, whilst happening to be more beautiful than God, was something of the charisma vacuum. If she was a colour, she would be beige. Nobody gets offended by beige, yet it makes no impact either. Beige is the colour you choose in order to please the most number of people, despite the fact you would be hard pushed to find anyone who actively likes it or rates it as a favourite. There’s no beige crayon is there?

It doesn’t stop there either.  The main villain looked like a member of an Exploited tribute band. This is an exceedingly bad thing. Having no menace or presence at all is a bit of a stumbling block when it’s your raison d'être in a film like this, to exude both. For comparisons sake, Escape From New York had Isaac fucking Hayes as it’s main villain for crying out loud!

Conversely it had the ruddy brilliant Alexander Siddig in it, and underused him to the point of criminality. Hardly seen him in anything since Deep Space Nine, except from getting blowed up in an early episode of Spooks, and being the only reason to sit through 3 tedious hours of Kingdom Of Heaven. He should get more work. What on Earth is his agent up to?

Finally it had the WORST song and dance number (yes, you read that correctly – SONG & DANCE NUMBER!) in the history of moving pictures. It makes that awful bit in the second Matrix movie look like Singing In The Rain. It is so criminally awful that Neil Marshall ought to have served actual jail time for devising it. If John Logie Baird had forseen what horror this dance number would provide, he would surely have hurled his new fangled television machine into a ravine, content to let humankind lumber forward without accessible moving picture technology. And who amongst us could blame him?

To conclude my long winded rumination: it whiled away 2 hours, but after the first half hour or so, it’s pretty much bollocks!

IMDB: DOOMSDAY