I’ll admit: when this writer reviewed 28 Years Later all the way back in June 2025, he didn’t have knowledge of disgraced British personality Jimmy Saville, which made the shock ending of a blonde-wigged and tracksuit-wearing gang saving the day play like a delightful non-sequitur. Yet a Wikipedia scan that provides context on that specific allusion will articulate just how odd these sequels are as modern IP—a deep dive into the darkest parts of British identity among the odd pleasures.
In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the Jimmy gang is back, led by Jack O’Connell in a role that oddly mirrors his Irish vampire villain in last year’s Sinners. They’ve taken Spike (Alfie Williams), the pre-teen protagonist of the previous entry, now separated from his parents, under their wing. They ended the last film saving Spike’s life from the infected, but it’s soon revealed they have nefarious means to install themselves as new leaders of a post-apocalyptic society, among them the brutal torture of any other survivors who won’t conform. The rather unpleasant violence in these sequences is a different beast than all the goofy spine-ripping (still here) of Boyle’s predecessor.
On the other end of the returning characters is Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the eccentric, isolated doctor who we saw both take care of Spike’s dying mother and use the muscular, well-endowed infected Samson (Chi-Lewis Parry) as his test subject to cure the virus. That idea continues here, and one increasingly sees the vision of a mad doctor hinging everything on his zombie buddy because he’s just a tad lonely. Frankly, it’s pretty fun to just hang out with Fiennes and the raging undead character. Fiennes has headlined so much Oscar bait and Europudding over the decades that you forget his true joie de vivre as a performer, particularly for exquisite comic timing. The film certainly realizes this, building a surprising amount of its runtime around Fiennes dancing, be it to Duran Duran or Iron Maiden. It’s like someone really appreciated that scene from A Bigger Splash.
In cutting between the two threads—each respectively serving as representations of masculinity that could form the future of young Spike—The Bone Temple makes clear its small and specific stakes. With very few locations or characters, the film perhaps operates with a deliberate, necessary austerity after so many resources went to Boyle’s predecessor. While Nia DaCosta does nothing nearly as exciting (and one Radiohead cue in particular feels borderline hack), it’s appropriate for something trying to be more of a character piece in an IP universe than a grand expansion of such.
As the middle chapter, The Bone Temple is a charming doodle promising a third film in its final scenes (including the return of a certain character). One can only hope audiences turn out so that we get the summation of what these two deeply odd films are trying to achieve.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in theaters Friday, January 16.