The zombie-movie genre is ripe for reinvention-it's been 25 years since George Romero made the witty, shopping-mall set, anti-capitalist Dawn of the Dead (remake due next year)-and the gang behind Trainspotting and The Beach have tried just that. Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland do add a few new twists, but their decision to go with an extremely ugly digital-video look pretty much undoes much of their inventiveness.

One of Boyle and Garland's best twists was to change the zombies from lumbering, stumbling oafs into rage-infected crazies who move faster than rabid dogs, something bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) finds out pretty quickly after awaking from a coma and finding London more or less deserted. It seems animal-rights activists have set a countrywide plague in motion by freeing some diseased monkeys that promptly turned on their liberators. Once bitten, the transformation from normal human to raging monster takes only a few seconds, so infections increase exponentially throughout the country. Soon England is a wasteland.

Jim, appropriately stunned by waking up seemingly alone in one of the world's great metropolises, leaves his hospital bed and wanders aimlessly through the empty streets, allowing Boyle to fashion some of the film's most eerily effective scenes. After a confrontation with a zombie-priest that leads to him being pursued by a flock of the infected, Jim is rescued by two fellow survivors, Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley). Soon the trio finds two more "normals"-a father, Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), desperate to find less dangerous surroundings. A trip to the country seems in order...

28 Days Later does have its fair share of in-your-face dialogue and visually inventive scenes: Selena, noticing Jim's growing affection for her, bluntly asks, "Do you want us to find a cure and save the world or fall in love and fuck?" ; the sequence involving loving father Frank's demise turns out to be both stylish and moving. In the end, however, Boyle's decision to go with murky, grainy-as-hell digital video coupled with Garland's increasingly unimaginative script make 28 Days Later a misfire, if a not altogether uninteresting misfire.