Starring Rhona Mitra, Malcolm McDowell. Written and directed by Neil Marshall. (18A) 105 min. Opens Mar 14.
Neil Marshall is no longer batting 1.000. Doomsday is the British writer-director’s first misfire after the B+ B-movies Dog Soldiers and The Descent. The earnest craftsmanship and effective lo-fi scares in those films (the first an old-school werewolf throwdown; the second a spelunking-gone-bad thriller) suggested that Marshall might be the UK’s answer to John Carpenter. It unfortunately follows that Doomsday — set some 30 years in the future after a deadly virus has left the whole of Scotland under military quarantine — is a bald-faced rip-off of Escape From New York, right down to the ass-kicking one-eyed protagonist.
In lieu of Snake Plissken, we get Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), a cigarette-smoking hard case enlisted by England’s shady higher-ups to infiltrate the walled wasteland of Scotland in search of a cure for the virus — which has suddenly popped up in London. Her unit (a collection of Aliens-style grunts far less vivid than a similar group in Dog Soldiers) hasn’t been in the post-apocalyptic highlands but five minutes before running afoul of some Road Warrior-esque punks with flesh-eating tendencies (cue the Fine Young Cannibals on the soundtrack).
Marshall’s grindhouse affections seem sincere, and he doesn’t skimp on the gory details. (We get the best bunny-blasting since Raising Arizona.) And, at this point, it’s almost refreshing to watch a genre piece that isn’t straining to be a contemporary allegory; there’s plenty of dialogue about the end of civilization and man’s inhumanity to his fellows, but as most of it is delivered by Malcolm McDowell wearing silly furs, there’s no danger of taking it seriously. Yet Doomsday is a lot — a lot a lot — less fun than it should be: Marshall’s knack for small-scale thrills simply doesn’t translate to the inherently grandiose dictates of the post-apocalyptic-wasteland subgenre. The film looks cheap (not in an endearing way) and the action scenes are standard-issue quick-cut affairs — the final multi-car-pileup is strictly Mild Max.