28 Years Later: How That Crazy Ending Sets Up A Very Different Sequel

This article contains plenty of 28 Years Later spoilers.

No one ever expects ninja chavs.

Admittedly before the closing 60 or so seconds of 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland had already included plenty of swerves in their long-awaited 28 Days Later sequel. But the sudden appearance of Sir Jimmy (Jack O’Connell, somehow making a character just as memorable as his vampire in Sinners with a fraction of the screen time) and his band of mulleted, tracksuit-loving hooligans, complete with ostentatious jewelry, defies all expectations, especially when they start slaughtering the infected while doing backflips like some sort of brutal British Power Rangers.

The arrival of Sir Jimmy and his band of merry men and women raises SO MANY questions about 28 Years Later, and not just because it suddenly changes the movie’s tone, which already went through a few shifts. It also raises questions about what’s to come, the two movies that will complete this new trilogy, starting with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta. Let’s unpack!

Sir Jimmy’s Merry Knights

As incongruous as Sir Jimmy and his lot might initially feel, they aren’t actually new to the movie. In fact, the film opens with Jimmy as a child, sitting in a room with other kids and watching Teletubbies. Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) manages to escape when an infected parent rushes in and kills the other youngsters, only to find his father, an Anglican priest, welcoming the infected as a glorious part of judgment day. Before giving himself up to the infected, the priest gives Jimmy his crucifix and tells him not to fear.

Boyle’s camera makes a point of zooming in on the crucifix when Sir Jimmy and his troupe—dubbed, appropriately enough, “the Jimmies”—come to rescue Spike. However, the movie doesn’t yet reveal how young Jimmy’s traumatic experience affected the striking adult we see at the end. Does he have his own religious zeal, just as strange as that of his father? Or did the crucifix just set off a life-long love of jewelry, manifesting in the many rings that adorn his fingers and ears? Also isn’t he wearing that crucifix upside down?

Between the frenetic editing and loud music drops, both touchstones of early 2000s British indie cinema that Boyle gleefully revives here, it’s hard to make out the identity of the Jimmies. But 28 Years Later‘s credits point out a few familiar names playing characters with names that are also familiar… because they’re all “Jimmy.” Erin Kellyman, a genre staple who appeared in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and The Green Knight, plays Jimmy Ink. Emma Laird from A Haunting in Venice and The Brutalist appears as Jimmima. The rest of the Jimmies are called Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Jimmy, Jimmy Shite, and Jimmy Snake.

Certainly, we’ll see more of the various Jims in the next two movie or two, but we can already begin to see how they advance Boyle and Garland’s thematic concerns.

As indicated by the title Jimmy bestowed upon himself, the Jimmies appear to be operating like classical knights. Indeed, Jimmy’s excessive politeness suggests that he and his cohorts subscribe to some type of chivalry code, the virtuous ideals to which knights pledged in medieval Europe. Those knights crafted their values out of a particular interpretation of Christianity, one that may not have been dissimilar to the type that Jimmy’s father impressed upon him.

A Return of the Aristocracy?

The Jimmies’ medieval ways are just one of the many regressions we see in 28 Years Later. The people of Spike’s hometown Lindisfarne defend themselves with rows of archers, not unlike those who once lined castles—a point Boyle drives home by interjecting footage from old movies.

For Garland, this antiquated behavior is more than a plot point built from the fact that the UK has been quarantined from the rest of the world for nearly three decades. Rather it’s a reflection of the world as he sees it, marked by right-leaning movements in the U.S. and UK, including possibly Brexit.

“I think for a lot of my life, it felt like one lived in a progressive state, which is to say a state of looking forwards to how the world will be more equitable and more fair,” Garland recently told Den of Geek. “But in the last 10 to 15 years, and I mean this in a literal way, it’s become more regressive. There’s a lot of looking to the past, and it’s a version of the past that has some component elements in it. … It will cherry pick, it’s selective in what it chooses to remember, and it also misremembers.”

One gets that sense of cherry-picking in the Jimmies. They seem to embrace the romance and glory of being knights (and don’t seem particularly embarrassed by the their stunted sense of fashion), but they don’t address any of the downsides that come with it, namely the animalistic glee they have with killing the infected, who become far more humanized in this movie.

By relegating the Jimmies to one surprising and comic scene, 28 Years Later didn’t really have enough space to explore how they represent another aspect of regression. Instead we had to rely on elements such as Dr. Kelson’s (Ralph Fiennes) reliance on primitive cures—even as his medical pedigree leads him to being labeled a menace by neighbors who’d rather live without a doctor at all than have his help.

However, we can expect this theme to be explored further in the sequels. When we even asked Garland if this world might one day return to having an aristocracy with a king or queen, Garland teased: “I’d say, let’s see if we ever get to make three movies, because it would essentially address that. If you take technology away, where do people look and what is it they choose to remember, and how do they configure themselves? So it’s kind of a background note rather than the whole scheme, but by the end of the second film, the scheme starts to get more stated.”

We will see that scheme take furter shape in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which releases on Jan. 16, 2026.