Warm Bodies
A small but warm-hearted effort to reinvent the zombie genre
Nicolas Hoult, best known as Marcus Brewer from About A Boy and the Beast in the newer X-Men franchise, is almost all grown up. And in Warm Bodies, he does his best to affect a cute and well-meaning zombie, known simply as R, who is gifted with elaborate inner monologues (read: voice overs) but is nonetheless forced to shuffle around (and eat brains) like the rest of the post-apocalyptic zombified population. Enter ‘The Girl’, here played with reserved charm by Teresa Palmer, who sparks something in R that he hasn’t felt…well, at least since he died. In a pretty shaky turn of the plot, Teresa’s Julie ends up back at R’s ‘lair’, which is in fact a defunct airplane at the airport, where he has amassed collections of trinkets and especially vinyl records. He plays the latter ad nauseum for his new sweetheart, and an unlikely love story between star-crossed lovers is well underway.
In the age of The Walking Dead, where even basic cable now has a healthy helping of really nasty and dangerous zombies, the already-softened R (along with his ‘buddy’ M played by comic standout Rob Corddry) breaks so many zombie conventions that even the most lackadaisical horror buff may object. Sure, there’s one attack scene where some brain-eating happens (the brains belong to Julie’s ill-fated boyfriend, played by David Franco), but the horror element is routinely dealt with and then promptly forgotten about, essentially setting up a pretty formulaic romance within a zombie-like atmosphere. The humor is good, with Hoult’s deadpan zombie face and shrugged rigor mortis shoulders serving him well, but in general this film could have gone deeper in about 17 different interesting directions, and it’s more than a little disappointing that so many risks were never attempted.
Look for a welcome visit from young character actress Analeigh Tipton as Julie’s bestie, as well as the inexplicable presence of John Malkovich as Julie’s staunchly anti-cute-zombies father (and military commander).
Warm Bodies releases on DVD June 4th.
—Dan Heching