[Movie Review] DOOMSDAY
Oh Neil Marshall, sir, what have you done? The ego has well and truly landed has it not?
You’re from my neck of the woods, a local lad made good, and with the fantastic Dog Soldiers and the really rather good The Descent behind you, you’re clearly a very talented force in the movie making industry of today and a homegrown talent to be proud of. Hell, every interview I’ve read or seen you in has shown you to be a down-to-earth type with just a passion for cinema that could rival Quentin Tarantino.
But whatever on God’s green earth made you think that making a “greatest hits” compilation of your favourite movies and passing it off as something “original” would pass with us cynical movie goers? I came away from this movie not knowing what the hell to write and have spent the last week holding off on writing this review because I genuinely didn’t know what side of the fence I should sit on regarding Doomsday.
Do I compliment the film for its strong sense of pace and great visual eye, because I’m desperate not to slate the guy who gave us Dog Soldiers, a film I have a huge amount of time for, or do I call the film out for what it is - which is one of the laziest, slap-hazard odes to John Carpenter seen in a long time. All involved thought they were making a love-letter to Carpenter’s Escape From New York. They’ve actually ended up creating a stalker’s missive to Carpenter’s Ghosts From Mars instead.
Marshall’s Doomsday tells of a lethal virus that spreads throughout the British isles, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. To contain the threat, acting authorities brutally quarantines Scotland where the outbreak has originated as it succumbs to fear and chaos. Said quarantine is successful and three decades later, the ‘Reaper’ virus, as it has become known, violently resurfaces in London. An elite group of specialists, led by Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), is urgently dispatched into the still-quarantined country 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 fuelled by survivors of the original virus who have split themselves into two camps – crazed, cannibalistic Mad-Max-rejects and a society of medievel-era-evoking savages.
From a performance point of view, Doomsday is shoddy to say the least. There’s not a strong, competent performer in the entire cast. Then again, when Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell have sold themselves so far down the “we’ll do anything for a pay cheque” river, do you expect anything less? Casting Rhona Mitra doesn’t do your film any favours either, for whilst there’s no arguing that she’s ”quite the looker”, you can’t escape the fact that she cannot act for shit. The likes of Adrian Lester, David O’Hara and Sean Pertwee have obviously spotted that they’re being led by someone playing at, and failing to execute, “tough” and they all have switched off from giving away anything that could be considered “talented” performances.
The worst of the lot though is Marshall’s “lucky charm”, Craig Ferguson (he’s appeared in all of Marshall’s productions in some manner - known best of all as the lead creature in The Descent) who absolutely derails the entire film with his completely ill-judged, cartoon villain role here.
There’s some well shot set pieces and the sense of pace means that, if watched when very drunk, you’ll get a passable good time and the feeling of relentlessness and the occasional flashes of gore mean boredom isn’t a feeling you’ll fall into easily. BUT you will fall into that feeling I assure you because there’s absolutely nothing in this film that you haven’t seen done before, and done better. The film plays less like an actual, cohesive film and more like a tick-list whereby you cross off the bits that channel – deep breath – Escape From New York, Aliens, Mad Max II, Night of the Living Dead, Terminator II and so on and so forth.
There’s not an original moment in this entire film. Not one. It’s so desperate to cram in “homages” to all the writer-director’s favourite films of (in particular but not exclusive to) the 80s that not one single moment is given time to breath; no sooner are we introduced to the virus driven zombies then we’re off into some stupid introduction of Mitra’s character involving a detachable remote controlled CCTV eyeball (I shit you not!) and attempts to desperately channel James Cameron’s incarnations of Ripley or Sarah Connor. Then we’re off on stealing from Escape From New York to get the story going, then an Aliens riffing subplot, then lots of chases and explosions that look quite nice, gore here and there, then a lot more tedious cross-referencing of other better movies, more splatterings of gore and then an over-in-the-blink-of-an-eye pastiche of the glorious finale of Mad Max II.
This does not make a good movie I assure you. It makes it a mildly watchable one, I’ll give you that much, (well… at least until that ridiculously crap final scene!) but that all falls down to Marshall’s panache as a director. His talent as a writer and his work shepherding the cast are a failure so big that it wrecks the movie.
Marshall has openly refused to get involved with the long delayed Dog Soldiers sequel and the in-production sequel to The Descent simply because, in his words, he’s “not sure [he's] got a story to tell that [he] wants to tell”. So what made you go with this film then? Because there’s certainly not a strong story being told up on screen, let alone one that needs to be told.
If the theory is true that every ‘great’ director has one bad movie in him, then please let this be it and let’s get Marshall back on stronger footing then this. He’s capable of much better!
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