Two brutal, furious, and heavy-handed hours in a tight bomb shelter with characters who range from bland to grotesque, sadistic cartoons. You will feel every minute. Even tighter than the environment is the browner-shade-of-brown color palette.

The first and last sequences, both set above ground, include rather astounding visuals, and there are a handful of credible performances (the often undervalued, very commanding Michael Biehn deserves a worthy role in a studio picture or perhaps an HBO series), but the experience becomes grating and then numbing. There is torture-porn in the DNA of this apocalyptic vision, but it is also self-righteous and assured of its symbolic wit. This is a bad combination. The film is too stone cold serious to blossom into a blazing pulp entertainment in the tradition of Mad Max, but it is nowhere near as moving or intelligent as The Road. It's just mean and bloated.

Since the movie begins with a bomb dropping, and the characters are in the shelter within two minutes, there is no sense of these characters' lives before the event. They are thinly drawn to say the least. The most unpleasant scenes involve an unstable single mom (poor Rosanna Arquette) being slowly raped and tortured to death by two snot-nosed, power-mad, shaved-head goons, one played with empty ferocity by Milo Ventimiglia.

C-