Boyle develops scripts with catchy stories within a certain range. His movies are nonetheless hard to categorize because he combines ancient tropes--original sin; destruction and re-creation; the original paradise; the first, fratricidal killing--with the cruel disinterest of the ironist, who watches like an entomologist until the members of the tight little community start turning on each other. Unfortunately he doesn't have a literary mind and so doesn't know how to put the elements together. His major failing is coarseness. He appears to think that if you slam two ideas together they'll stick, and if they don't they'll at least strike sparks. That's a valid way to work if what you care about is effectiveness, no matter what.
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.
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