Remember when we had no choice but to watch beefed-up, brainless brutes try to save the day in any ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic action thriller? Thank goodness those times have changed, and we can shout the mantra that hotness prevails even as the source of all that hotness goes about kicking the posterior of any man who dares get in her way.

I don't know if Rhona Mitra could take out the likes of Milla Jovovich -- but I do know that is one catfight I would pay lots of money to see. One thing I do know, however, is that Doomsday is all about Rhona Mitra. Without her, this movie crashes and burns. As others have pointed out, Doomsday is (to put it nicely) highly derivative of several earlier films; the weird thing is that most of those derivative scenes and situations are pretty stupid and over-the-top. Even the great Michael McDowell isn't in the film long enough to make his character's recidivistic little fiefdom believable, but it's the whole Mad Max society that really weighs heavily on this film's overall success (or lack thereof).

One song you won't hear on this film's hard-edged soundtrack is Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." Everybody fears the Reaper virus, as it has engulfed all of Scotland in a matter of days. Despite serious international ramifications, the British government makes the seemingly sane choice of placing the whole of Scotland in quarantine. I'm not sure how they went about building an elaborate wall all the way across the border of England and Scotland almost overnight, but build it they did, essentially sentencing every inhabitant of Scotland to a horrible death.

One of the few souls to escape (albeit without her right eye) grows up to become Britain's hottest female cop -- and, 30 years after the Reaper virus outbreak, the person chosen to lead a team of cure-seekers back into the plagued northern lands. It seems the British government has been covering up any and all knowledge of a significant number of survivors existing in Scotland. Now the virus has popped up again -- in no less a place than London -- so all will be lost if a cure is not discovered very quickly. Major Eden Sinclair (Mitra) and her team have less than 48 hours to get in to Scotland, find a source for the cure and return home to save the day.

The plan goes awry fairly quickly as the team is attacked by a gang of ruffians with really bad haircuts, an obsession with facial tattoos and absolutely no fashion sense. When they're not doing whatever animalistic morons do, they like to rock out to Fine Young Cannibals music and, on occasion, eat one another. Later on, what's left of the team finds yet another society of loons living quite the mediaeval lifestyle. Holed up in an ancient castle, these guys take the Renaissance festival lifestyle (Huzzah!) to bold new lows. McDowell's talents seem rather wasted on his role as the little fiefdom's leader, and the story quickly reverts back to its strength -- gory, nonstop violence.

As long as you look at the script as nothing more than an excuse for stringing together a bunch of bloody fight scenes, you have a good chance of enjoying what you see here. The story itself is hopelessly muddled, a sort of Frankenstein's monster sewn together with different parts of other, easily recognizable movies. That's the real source of frustration among a majority of fans. Director Neil Marshall raised the bar quite high with his two previous films, Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Very much unlike those two films, Doomsday is little more than a mindless ode to violence and unoriginality.