IMDB Plot Synopsis: Doomsday takes place nearly three decades after a lethal virus called the Reaper nearly wipes out Scotland and causes the rest of the world to wall off the country. When the Reaper begins to emerge in England 25 years later, an elite team and their leader (Rhona Mitra) are sent to the contaminated landscape of Scotland to find a cure.My Synopsis: BLOODY. AWFUL. FILM.
I'm sorry to those of you that may actually find some enjoyment from this drivel but I certainly did not. It's one and a quarter hours out of my life I'll never get back, that's for sure.
The problems are as follows:
Doomsday is a poor Englishman's Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome and Escape from New York hybrid. There are scenes that are almost exact duplicates from those two 'far superior' movies and that kind of re-hash really annoys me! The wall around Scotland idea, the battle between Rhona's character (Major Eden Sinclair) and the giant bad guy in an arena surrounded by resident nutters, the car chase etc etc. Same old, same old but so much worse...
Malcolm McDowell, Bob Hoskins and Alexander Siddig are all woefully underused and I'm amazed they were cajoled into appearing in this film at all. You wouldn't consider them A-listers but c'mon they act like bad Punch and Judy characters with the poorly written scripts and badly directed scenes, so much so that I felt uncomfortable watching them.
Rhona Mitra hasn't done herself any favours taking the lead in this movie either, her wooden acting makes Pinocchio looks like a 'real boy' and elevates her 'action heroin' rival Mila Jojovich to almost Oscar standards in comparison. Don't get me wrong, I like Miss Mitra and she's definitely got the looks and body of a future action star but with the material she's given it's a surprise she didn't phone her scenes through...
The random scenes of over the top gore left me asking "why"? It seemed so unnecessary in places and lowered the film to a cheap hack slash/ shock horror film that it just didn't need to become.
The editing in places was amazingly bad, during one car scene for example the camera flitted around like a one winged budgie trying to take flight and I actually had to look away as it was doing my head in.
All in all I was thoroughly unimpressed by this movie (as you can obviously tell) and from a director and writer who brought us much more interesting movies like Dog Soldiers and the Decent I'm a little worried Neil Marshall has lost his way.
2/10 (and the two points are for Rhona Mitra herself!)
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