23 years after 28 Days Later comes premature post-apocalyptic threequel 28 Years Later, set in a dystopian Britain that remains under quarantine while the Rage Virus has been eradicated in continental Europe.

If the setup is meant to be a commentary on Brexit, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are the consecutive Tory prime ministers who couldn’t hold on for five years and jumped headfirst into the unknown without a plan. This arduous and apathetic affair strongly suggests the director and writer only came back if they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, and the outcome is as hopelessly misguided as its protagonist; a 12-year-old boy (Alfie Williams) who escapes his island community in search of a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) to treat his ailing mother (Jodie Comer).

The result is several bad films in one, and the only thing they have in common is that they have nothing to do with 28 Days Later. The movie ricochets between the survivalist nonsense of A Quiet Place, the wacky fantasy of Zardoz (another infamous product of giving a filmmaker free rein) and most bizarrely, the kids-do-mythology comedy of The Kid Who Would be King (a film that would otherwise have been buried in a car park). This leaves the movie completely confused as to what it is trying to be, while feeling simultaneously dated and the kind of self-consciously random exercise that could only have arrived in the era of Netflix and A24.

That disappointment is compounded by a cheap visual quality that makes you wonder where the $60 million budget went, primarily shot on iPhones for no apparent reason other than indulgence on the part of Boyle, who inserts annoying repeated shots from other media, painful electro-bagpipe music and a lazy video game-style slow-motion kill shot in the absence of any effective gore. Not so much a horror movie as a LARP-based soap opera (complete with dodgy Geordie accents), the story only gets started at the very end (the sequel has already been shot), when Garland throws in an audacious British cultural reference that will presumably be lost on American audiences (who won’t have understood any of the dialogue anyway, if Cheryl Cole’s short-lived stint in the US is anything to go by).

However daring the denouement, it leaves you questioning why we had to sit through all that bad acting, inconsistent characterisation and nonsensical editing to get there, and wishing they had jumped straight to 28 Years and Two Hours Later.