Review of Doomsday (2008) by Rob M — 24 Jun 2009

Arriving at my decision to watch Neil Marshall's latest was largely spurred by his previous work, The Descent, which was a fun, original, uniquely paced horror flick. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Doomsday.

While Marshall certainly takes another stab at putting a twist on a generic action-thriller film, his efforts fall short. The premise is very simple, despite the (long and tedious) voice-over intro which tries to sell it as something more than it is. Here's the gist: in the future a really nasty virus kills a bunch of people. The powers that be build a wall to isolate the sick people. Fast forward 30 years. The sick people aren't sick anymore and the people who weren't sick are now sick. Time to find a cure. How? The logical solution, of course: send in a crack team of awesome soldiers, led by sexy Rhona Mitra (previously one of the official Lara Croft models - don't ask how I know this...). The team arrives beyond the wall and...turns out that surviving the virus has the nasty side effect of turning people into punk-styled stuntmen full of tons of pressurized V8 juice.

Yes, the film is really violent. People expire with alarming hilarity...er, regularity. Throughout, it seems that Marshall is absolutely obsessed with obtaining an "R" rating for the film with wanton - and strangely ineffective - violence. But for a few deaths and a fun trick played late in the film involving the dead and decapitated girlfriend of the villain, there seems to be little purpose in any of the bloody deaths.

Herein lies the problem: Doomsday plays like a b-movie gore flick and actually comes close (oh-so-close!) to being genuinely fun. Sadly, the film takes itself so seriously that this opportunity is lost and what's left is an overly earnest, yet poorly paced story stunted by it's own grown-up ambitions.

Although it was enjoyable at certain moments, the film, for as much as I wanted it to succeed, just didn't deliver.