Doomsday

Most fantasy-action films blow their budgets in the first half-hour, and limp home with their makeup smeared. Doomsday is unusually patient, smartly saving most of its fireworks for the later innings.

It's a flying circus from the agile mind of writer-director Neil Marshall, who moves past the movies that sound a lot like this one (those often starring Milla Jovovich or Kate Beckinsale) and builds a sleek new car from old parts.

It's refreshing to see a movie like this that isn't based on a videogame or a graphic novel and, though it borrows liberally from George Romero and George Miller, Doomsday proves itself as much more than a second-rate knockoff.

Attention, apocalypse-hungry filmgoers: Doomsday may be the blue-light special you're looking for.

Doomsday writer/director Neil Marshall seems to be running out of ideas or at least new ways to make old ideas fresh.

This post-apocalyptic action blowout, courtesy of writer/director Neil Marshall, lives fast and dies hard -- but it delivers the goods.

Doomsday is so beholden to other, better movies, it will never get out of debt.

Neil Marshall's follow-up to the spectacularly creepy The Descent starts off strong but devolves into a runaway hodgepodge of sci-fi and post apocalyptic movie cliches.

Neil Marshall's Doomsday is a Frankenstein-like creation stitched together with equal parts Escape from New York, Aliens, and Mad Max.

No one who's seen The Descent or Marshall's debut, Dog Soldiers, will be surprised by the high-level of gore on display.

Neil Marshall’s fixation on John Carpenter and early James Cameron is all too apparent, but his own distinctive cinematic style isn’t, making Doomsday a likeably rambling but generic shoot-’em-up.

The acting is better than adequate, and Rhona Mitra is very good as the jaded heroine.

Neil Marshall cribs whole sections from other movies (Aliens and The Road Warrior, most blatantly) so baldly that you have to wonder how he'd like it if someone ripped off The Descent this egregiously.

Serious cinema purists will be appalled by all the spatter and excess they see on the screen, but really, Doomsday isn't the end of the world.

Neil Marshall is no longer batting 1.000. Doomsday is the British writer-director’s first misfire after the B+ B-movies Dog Soldiers and The Descent.

If you crossed I Am Legend with 28 Days Later and Road Warrior, you’d have Doomsday. But you wouldn’t want it.

Natural selection means survival of the hottest in a flamboyantly silly post-apocalyptic thriller with a heavy debt to The Road Warrior.

If you can accept this farrago of nonsense, and enjoy simulated beheadings and lopped-off hands and massive spurts and splashes of blood, this may be the movie for you.

Step aside, zombie films -- there's a new derivative genre in town. The post-apocalyptic thriller is out to trump your ongoing redundancy.

This is the kind of B movie Planet Terror was poking fun at. So it's two hours or so of ridiculous, gory violence; brain-dead plotting; horrible acting; and strippers. You were expecting Daniel Day-Lewis?

If you long to see a man burned alive and eaten by cannibalistic “survivors” when herds of cattle are around, this is your movie. It's not mine.

Imagine a sci-fi thriller that begins by copying 28 Days Later and every other "virus wipes us out" movie of recent vintage and rolls on to steal from Escape from New York.