Doomsday (2008)

Director: Neil Marshall

Writer: Neil Marshall

Composer: Tyler Bates

Starring:Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Adrian Lester, David O'Hara, Malcolm McDowell

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The End Is Nigh.

Plot: A lethal virus spreads throughout Scotland, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. To contain the threat, acting authorities brutally quarantine the country as it succumbs to fear and chaos. The quarantine is successful. Three decades later, the Reaper virus violently resurfaces in London. An elite group of specialists, including Eden Sinclair, is urgently dispatched into Scotland to retrieve a cure by any means necessary. Shut off from the rest of the world, the unit must battle through a landscape that has become a waking nightmare.

My rating: 5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

This flick is all over the place.  It starts out feeling like some killer virus picture that takes a lot of inspiration from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) but then it turns into a post apocalyptic THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981) wanna be and then it introduces Malcolm McDowell as Kane, the leader of survivors that live in castles and live and fight as 13th century knights and such which all brings us back to a huge ROAD WARRIOR car chase.  Whew.  All this picture needed was for Flash Gordon to show up and save the day. I wished he had.  There might be something worthwhile in this flick but I barely saw any of it if there was.  My issues are with the all-too-tightly edited action scenes (and there are A LOT of action scenes) which make the images too frenetic to focus on and enjoy whatever the hell is going on.  The other is the near-constant bombardment of action music.  It's remarkable how forceful and unrelenting the score is for long stretches at a time.  I needed some silence after the picture was over to decompress.  As for the players, Bob Hoskins is great (no surprises there), Malcolm McDowell is his usual disgruntled self and Rhona Mitra (as the main character, Eden Sinclair) is OK but she's lacking that spark of charisma that gives an action role like this a bit of fun.  She goes through the motions as you'd expect but she was rarely enjoyable.  It would have served the film a little bit if she'd have injected some semblance of showmanship but with the fast editing and thunderous score, it probably wouldn't have helped much.