Doomsday
A rabbit gets shot and explodes. A cow gets run over by a huge military machine. A guy with a mohawk is beheaded on top of a sports car. No, it’s not a John McCain campaign ad. It’s Doomsday from Neil Marshall and it’s chock-full of gory goodness and action movie clichés. With a sexy heroine, desolate wastelands, and a whole lot of blood spatter, this 2008 sci-fi/action flick should do the job for gamers and gawkers of all varieties.
If the premise of Doomsday seems borrowed from just about every movie ever made, it’s because it has been. This seems like Marshall’s homage to the end-of-the-world genre. If it’s not an homage, however, Marshall owes an awful lot to Mad Max, 28 Days Later, Escape from New York, The Warrior, and even The Fisher King. Luckily Marshall cites many of those films as primary influences, so he’s off the hook on that front.
Doomsday can be a rollicking-good ride with the brain turned off, that’s for sure. Rhona Mitra stars as the Snake Plisken-inspired Eden Sinclair (talk about your porn names!), a soldier who leads a police task force. See, in 2008 a lethal plague infected Scotland and the country was blocked off from the rest of the world. It’s up to Eden to head back into Scotland in 2035 to find a cure because the plague has spread to the rest of the England. Eden heads over the wall, so to speak, and into the desolate remains of Scotland to find the cure and take down some bad guys.
There’s a lot to like about Doomsday. For starters, Mitra is solid as the heroine of this tale of destruction. She’s got just the right look and physicality to pull it off, even if she does resemble the heroine of the Resident Evil family of films a little too much. Nevertheless, Mitra’s unflinching attitude towards the blood and guts of Doomsday proves her mettle as a solid lead action hero. Her ability to utilize about three different facial expressions makes her the ideal candidate for this type of pulp-grindhouse gloriousness.
Then there’s the blood and guts. At times, Doomsday reaches so much for the extra dose of gore that it becomes laughable. Close-ups of meaningless brutality are shown, probably to emphasize the point that all is lost in Scotland (we knew that already!) and that the natives have taken to eating one another. Yet when Marshall goes to the point of making the act of chopping up a charred human being look actually appetizing (maybe it was just me, but that thing looked like it would be good with a little mint jelly), it becomes a little strange.
Doomsday has its moments of stellar action choreography and the film’s climax is a speed-infused barn-burner of a sequence, complete with plenty of blood and explosions. For the most part, though, the action scenes belong somewhere in a sleazy 70s exploitation flick. Of course, that’s just what makes Doomsday such an intriguing prospect. Its unabashed and shameless approach to violence and brutality hearkens back to the films of yore with reckless abandon, giving us cardboard characters, mindless violence, ridiculous dialogue, and random nudity.
Overall, Doomsday won’t save any souls or win over any converts. Sure, Scotland thought the movie would help boost tourism, but Marshall’s little film is just another blip on the radar. It’s a decent action movie with plenty of explosions and ample doses of gore, but the characters are far too flat and the plot is far too clichéd to resonate any deeper than a simple matinée viewing with plenty of popcorn and maybe a comic book for the slow parts. Doomsday works best as an homage to the ruthless grindhouse genre that spouted so many similar films. In that respect, it ain’t half bad.
Trailer:
