Warm Bodies

2013 zombie romantic comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Romeo and Juliet, but with zombies.

I don't care what you do with the genre anymore--a movie with zombies just isn't going to seem creative. This one has its moments, but I didn't really like either of the leads, the too-obviously-named R and Julie. Nicolas Hoult spends the movie shuffling. It's a tough task to give a character any personality and make him likable when the character is of the walking dead variety, but Hoult nearly makes it happen. I hate how he redevelops an ability to talk though, but that's probably not his fault. Teresa Palmer's Julie might actually have less personality. John Malkovich's also in this, but his character could have been played by anybody. Anyway, R gets a hoodie because there's no other way to show the audience that he's the young slacker type, and this plays like an angst-ridden teenage romance flick, not much different than I imagine those Twilight movies to be. Those Romeo and Juliet parallels might be a little amateurish. Heck, this thing even gets its own balcony scene:

Julie: "R? R? Wherefore art thou, R?"
R: "Uggh. Buuuuuuu."

Their relationship builds sweetly enough, I guess, with a little bit of montage, some left-of-the-dial rock tracks, and a few other tricks that might seem as tired as the whole zombie thing. The movie seems to be actively avoiding the Z-word for a lot of this. They're "corpses" here instead. This plays by most of the rules already established in the countless other zombie movies which just seems kind of lazy to me, but there are some new twists. Like the talking. One "conversation" between R and Rob Corddry's character is a clever idea but not all that well executed. And then there's the idea that eating brains gives you the memories of the victim, something that seems more like a cheap device than anything else. There's some satirical imagery at the beginning, parallels to the mundaneness of real life, these poor dead people living (well, not living exactly) a banal existence where they're zombie-walkin' around an airport. I liked a shot with R stumbling around all the other zombies that flashes to color. He's still a zombie, but suddenly, everybody else is alive but zombified anyway, just standing around and talking into their hands. Satire might be a little too obvious though. I also liked the sneaky record vs. mp3 player metaphor in there although throwing in a stereopticon might have been taking it too far. Oh, I didn't like the boneys or whatever those scarier zombies were called. Those things looked stupid. Actually, the problem wasn't that they looked stupid. It was more that they all looked and moved exactly the same. Silly CGI. This isn't a terrible movie; I just can't decide if it had unfulfilled potential or if it was ZOA. That's Zombified On Arrival which is probably not nearly as clever as I want it to be.