'28 Years Later: The Bone Temple': Hell on Earth Again.

Kurt Loder
Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" is the fourth installment of Danny Boyle's long-running zombie franchise, and it doesn't disappoint. Writer Alex Garland is still onboard tending the story, and while Boyle has handed off cinematic control to a fresh director, Nia DaCosta ("Candyman"), her taste for bloody mayhem is nearly the equal of his. If you're in the mood for something nasty and nicely done — people spooning up fresh tasty brains out of their late owners' skulls, for instance — you've come to the right movie.

It takes up pretty much where the last film, "28 Years Later," ended. You'll recall that narrative taking a sudden left turn with the last-minute introduction of a brassy new character called Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), into whose hands the story's teenage hero, Spike (Alfie Williams), had fallen. Now we find that Spike has been shanghaied into Lord Jimmy's sullen cult of Satan enthusiasts, all of whom bear some variation of their leader's name — there's Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, a girl called Jimmima. Spike isn't thrilled about having to hang out with these people, but the price of resistance is steep (there's a wild scene in which one of the Jimmys gets stabbed in the crotch — or near enough! — with ultra-gorey results).

As Lord Jimmy pursues a dream of actually finding "Old Nick" (Satan himself), we get reacquainted with the gentle doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Kelson lives in a bunker out in the countryside, a place equipped with a hand-cranked phonograph on which he spins old Duran Duran albums. Here he potters around tending to a "bone temple" comprising several towers of stacked skulls erected in honor of the many victims of the "rage virus," the pandemic that upended so many lives 28 years earlier and continues to claim victims. He has also made a friend (and patient) of a rage survivor he calls Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a formidable bruiser, usually nude, with an unexpected soft side.
Updated: Fri Jan 16, 2026

"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" is the fourth installment of Danny Boyle's long-running zombie franchise, and it doesn't disappoint. Writer Alex Garland is still onboard tending the story, and while Boyle has handed off cinematic control to a fresh director, Nia DaCosta ("Candyman"), her taste for bloody mayhem is nearly the equal of his. If you're in the mood for something nasty and nicely done — people spooning up fresh tasty brains out of their late owners' skulls, for instance — you've come to the right movie.

It takes up pretty much where the last film, "28 Years Later," ended. You'll recall that narrative taking a sudden left turn with the last-minute introduction of a brassy new character called Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), into whose hands the story's teenage hero, Spike (Alfie Williams), had fallen. Now we find that Spike has been shanghaied into Lord Jimmy's sullen cult of Satan enthusiasts, all of whom bear some variation of their leader's name — there's Jimmy Snake, Jimmy Shite, a girl called Jimmima. Spike isn't thrilled about having to hang out with these people, but the price of resistance is steep (there's a wild scene in which one of the Jimmys gets stabbed in the crotch — or near enough! — with ultra-gorey results).

As Lord Jimmy pursues a dream of actually finding "Old Nick" (Satan himself), we get reacquainted with the gentle doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Kelson lives in a bunker out in the countryside, a place equipped with a hand-cranked phonograph on which he spins old Duran Duran albums. Here he potters around tending to a "bone temple" comprising several towers of stacked skulls erected in honor of the many victims of the "rage virus," the pandemic that upended so many lives 28 years earlier and continues to claim victims. He has also made a friend (and patient) of a rage survivor he calls Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a formidable bruiser, usually nude, with an unexpected soft side.

The movie is turbo-charged by O'Connell's irresistibly demented Lord Jimmy, with his purple tracksuit, abundant bling, and fetching tiara. We first saw this character as a terrified kid fleeing infected zombies in the last movie; now he's in charge, impelling his followers to go out and perform daily "charitable acts" — by which he means things like flaying the skin off of whatever luckless individuals they can find to snatch and hold down. He's also growing curious about the mysterious Doctor Kelson, and wondering exactly what he's doing out there in his bone temple, and if he himself might be the Dark Lord that Jimmy has sought to meet for so long. (O'Connell's softly played incarnation of evil in this movie is very different from the demon-eyed vampire he plays in Ryan Coogler's "Sinners.")

Among the several things it does really well, "Bone Temple" makes the best-ever mainstream-movie use of a great Iron Maiden track. (It's worth seeing just for that sequence.) One reservation, though: It's a little strange that the Lord Jimmy character is obviously modeled on the late Jimmy Savile, the longtime British DJ and "Top of the Pops" host who maintained a decadeslong side career as one of the world's most loathsome sexual molesters. (The number of his victims, both children and adults, has been estimated to be around 450.) Rumors of Savile's sexual predations were whispered about for years; in a 1978 BBC interview, Sex Pistol John Lydon said there were stories "that we all know about but aren't allowed to talk about." Now we all know.