DOOMSDAY
Directed by Neil Marshall. Starring Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Adrian Lester, Malcolm McDowell. Now playing.
1 Star
Inessentiality is a quality we as a culture tend not to think about. Sometimes I fear we’re not very concerned whether the things that are currently distracting us are worth the attention we pay them.
Now along comes Neil Marshall’s Doomsday to teach us an important lesson about the hazards of inessentiality. It accomplishes this task primarily by borrowing from several movies that are in various ways better than it. Its secondary attainment of inessentiality relates to how it plays upon real-world fears and makes no more of them than a gritty backdrop for a completely asinine and pointlessly brutal film experience. Thirdly, what could be less essential than a thriller bereft of suspense?
Right off the bat, Doomsday recalls superior films with its focus on a devastating (and disgusting) plague that forces the British government to contain the contagion by partitioning Scotland. Thirty years later, when an outbreak threatens London, they discover survivors in Glasgow who may hold a key to the cure. They round up a tough Secret Service operative (Rhona Mitra) and tell her she has 48 hours to take a team into the “hot zone” and bring back a survivor. Set upon by the hordes of feral punk rockers who have taken over Scotland—or at least raided all its sex shops for leather harnesses—the team’s numbers are progressively hacked away as they battle past an urban cannibal rave, then a castle full of neo-medieval Luddites on the race back to the border.
Along the way, you’ll be reminded of 28 Days Later, Escape From New York, Aliens, The Road Warrior, and Planet Terror, to name the obvious ones, as Marshall plunders the imaginations of modern B-picture auteurs, splashing gouts of pus and blood everywhere as he goes. The spastic, incomprehensible editing style and steel-toned cinematography echo every action movie from the past decade, so your optic nerves should be well habituated.
Though mercifully shorter, Doomsday has quite a bit in common with the Rodriguez/Tarantino exploitation homage/fiasco Grindhouse in that Marshall is clearly recycling the beloved junk cinema of his youth. But where Grindhouse was calculated to be provocative and offensive, Doomsday is as serenely glib and affectless as the transition screens on a mega-violent videogame.
Mitra isn’t endowed with a machine gun leg, but she does have a removable prosthetic eye that she can roll into the midst of the action to get a fix on who she’s going to kill. Her waxen, impassive features recall Victoria Beckham—sort of a supreme deity of inessentiality in my books—and reflect the boredom you’ll start to feel after the umpteenth seizure-inducing fight sequence or full-screen dismemberment.
She’s joined by Bob Hoskins (will someone please give this man a decent role?) and Malcolm McDowell (who has been in too many terrible movies for this job to be considered slumming) in doing no more acting than is strictly necessary. There’s a capable supporting cast of human fodder, but since they’re endowed with no distinguishing features, who cares about their deaths?
Should you decide you’d like to see Doomsday anyhow, you should know that the “exciting” climax sets up a sequel and that your moviegoing dollar counts as a ballot on whether or not it should be made. While I’m usually not one to promote voter apathy, I’d like to suggest that you let the makers of Doomsday know there’s enough inessentiality in the world already by staying home.
