Twenty-eight weeks since the Rage virus tore across England, the Infected are dead or dying of malnutrition and a multinational relief effort has begun rebuilding the country. Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) is one of the survivors, now working with the US armed forces at their main camp in Canary Wharf. He’s delighted to be reunited with his children Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) who were overseas when the outbreak hit. He’s terrified of telling the truth: that he left their mother Alice (Catherine McCormack) to die when their hiding place was stormed.

But when the kids break out of containment, they find their mother, alive and carrying but not consumed by the virus…

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s initially calm direction goes feral and up close when all Hell breaks loose and is very much in lockstep with Danny Boyle’s work in the original. The sludgy digital video has, thank God, been replaced by something far more comprehensible and that allows Fresnadillo to play faster and looser as the movie goes on. The initial outbreak becomes a frenetic kill box of shots of film and rounds alike, and the final run through the London Underground is awkward, terrifying and pitch black. The movie looks amazing, and that’s backed up by a great cast and a clever script.

Poots and Muggleton are great as two kids who are actually, for once, written as kids. They’re determined, strong, deeply impulsive and dangerous, and everything they do is powered by their love of their family and the fact they didn’t live through the outbreak. One of the numerous, exhausting, saws fans of a certain stripe like to complain about is how they slip out of the relief centre so easily. The movie shows you how and trusts you to pick it up through the US soldiers’ joking about never seeing combat to the unsurprised, tired way Doyle (Jeremy Renner) calls in their escape. They get out because the US forces think they’re safe. They get out because in the end everyone does, because you have to see what happened to London and the country to understand it. It’s a terrible move, dealt with terribly, but that’s the key to this movie. No one makes the right move quite in time.

That sense of humanity and futility papers over the few cracks in Rowan Joffé, Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne and Jesus Olmo’s script. Don’s curdled paternal obsession with his kids and rage at himself is what defines his infection. Doyle and Scarlet (Rose Byrne), the two US soldiers at the centre of things, realise that the banal confidence that the virus can be destroyed completely only burns out their humanity. Byrne is very good here, and the movie sketches in the tension between her and Idris Elba as General Stone, her CO, brilliantly. Scarlet always asks the hard questions. Here, she gets the hard answers. Renner’s Doyle is possibly his career highlight aside from Wind River, a determined, focused and compassionate killer whose crisis of conscience is dealt with with the compassionate pragmatism of a soldier who can’t and won’t kill anymore. If you can, watch the trailer. Renner has a moment in there that was cut which tells you everything about Doyle. Harold Perrineau impresses too as Flynn, Doyle’s best friend and the world’s luckiest and least lucky chopper pilot.

The core of this movie is these people. Flawed, trying their best, failing, finding the strength to try again. When it works and it almost always does, it’s a note perfect expansion of the original. When it doesn’t work, and sometimes it really doesn’t, you get McCormack wasted on a near silent victim role, a really ill-advised use of a helicopter as a melee weapon and some mildly homophobic dialogue that had dated on release and has dated even worse now.

If you can, look past those. If you do, you’ll find a sequel that for me is on a par with the relationship between Alien and Aliens.

Verdict: A post-apocalypse story that becomes a pre-apocalypse one, with haunting visuals, great performances and a relentless sense of dread. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

Highlights: The kids, Doyle, the opening sequence, the Canary Wharf escape, the London Underground sequence

Lowlights: Some really crass action movie beats, some cludgy dialogue and even more female characters whose job is to be dead paragons of virtue.