28 Days Later has a graphic power that other shoestring shockers it will inevitably be compared to, e.g., George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Blair Witch Project (1999), can't approach, but at the next round of eliminations it's also clear that Boyle lacks the power of the no-budget visionaries, the David Lynch of Eraserhead (1977) and the Gus Van Sant of Mala Noche (1985). Boyle has no intellectual defenses against handed-down ideas (the "philosophical" discussion at the military dinner table about the epidemic is standard Hollywood horror movie prattle--see the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), for instance) and despite a hardboiled vernacular style he's not that intuitive, either.

Irony, which doesn't require great intellectual sophistication, is Boyle's best game. Irony is the genre that uses all the artifice of the storyteller in the service of a thoroughly de-romanticized vision of the world. (Once again, I would read Northrop Frye on irony and satire in his 1957 volume The Anatomy of Criticism to get a handle on this.) The shock comes from the friction between the artist's command of style and the loser protagonist's living out a worst-case scenario. Ordinarily movie magic is used to prostrate us before bigger-and-better-than-life heroes accomplishing prodigious feats. (Think of Ben-Hur, and how, for instance, we're expected to take his impolitic rebuff of Masala as virtuous steadfastness.) In irony the sensual pull of technique positions us so that we're rooting for a guy we know we shouldn't care about, while knowing that we're not even going to get what we want. When irony works we identify with the protagonist not despite his lack of virtue, brains, luck, beauty, all the standard equipment of the conventional bland hero, but because of it. The protagonist represents the worst parts of us and the smooth-talking ironist gets us to identify in defiance of our vanity. But you can end up grateful to the artist who, for once, doesn't just want to spin cotton candy inside your empty skull.

For the kind of irony that's distinct from comedy in terms of narrative structure, Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) is the quintessential protagonist: you know Barbara Stanwyck is going to be poison to him; he knows Barbara Stanwyck is going to be poison to him; but he falls, thinking he's jumping, and you find yourself hoping he lands on his feet. The movie maintains its moral bearings by the inclusion of Edward G. Robinson's character, and though no actor has ever made sheer goodness less phony, while watching the movie you want MacMurray to get away with something you'd gladly see him executed for if he were a real person. (No less so when he plans a second crime to cover up the first.)

Ewan McGregor was Boyle's original badboy protagonist, and when Boyle stopped pushing the edge almost desperately, as he had in Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), and relaxed with the comic irony of A Life Less Ordinary (1997), their talents threw out new, unexpected shoots. It was like the first spring in a calendar that had previously had only one season, winter--A Life Less Ordinary is a sensational black romantic comedy. (Click here for Stephanie Zacharek's Salon review, one of the very few to appreciate the movie.) Leonardo DiCaprio starred in Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's book The Beach, and you can see why the director and star would want to work together. DiCaprio is arguably the greatest male photographic model ever and a wonderful mime. (The two don't always go together: Marilyn Monroe was a great model but at best merely an endearingly woozy actress.) In The Beach, for instance, when DiCaprio sees a girl shot down or when he thinks he's about to be executed, he shows an expressive talent rivaling that of the greatest silent stars. He's so able to get us to identify with him that there's no need to make him likeable.