The survivors of 28 Days Later‘s zombie outbreak are safely sheltered in a US military-controlled Canary Wharf, until the Rage Virus comes back (presumably on the DLR), causing the biggest Docklands disaster since the Millennium Dome.

With its US military presence and London Underground settings, this 2007 sequel makes some poignant allusions to the Iraq War and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, but the plot has more holes than the Dodgy Dossier. For starters the Isle of Dogs seems such a bad choice for a resettlement camp that one can only assume the writers were thinking of the Isle of Wight. And why would such a heavily guarded compound allow two children to escape? Why has their mum been hiding under a bed for 28 weeks? Why do they let Robert Carlyle go in and snog an infected woman?

The outcome is unconvincing in all the ways 28 Days Later felt real. With Danny Boyle and Alex Garland seconded to Sunshine, Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo does a decent job of capturing the aesthetics of its predecessor, through more haunting deserted shots of London, grainy digital cinematography and bad performances from children. But Boyle’s humanity and lyricism are sorely missed, swapping the soulful scares of the epochal original for moments that are frankly just nasty. There is no real story this time, mainly comprising people running around and shooting at cheap CGI – and all filmed in such a dark, close-up, shaky-cam style that you can rarely make out what horrible things are meant to be happening.

28 Days Later also benefited from quirky and flawed British characters, such as Christopher Eccleston’s mad soldier and Brendan Gleeson’s sympathetic cabbie. Here the protagonists are generically earnest American army types (Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne), and a pair of painfully bland children (Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Gay Poots – those are the actual names of real humans) who are actually to blame for this second outbreak.

This all makes 28 Weeks Later a bloody slog of a sequel, whose effective elements are Canary-dwarfed by its inauthenticity.