Dropped by Robert Miller
PG-13, 1 hr. 37 min.
Comedy
Directed by: Jonathan Levine
Written by: Jonathan Levine, Isaac
Marion
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa
Palmer, Rob Corddry
John Malkovich
Released: February 1, 2013
Lionsgate Films
Old-school monsters, a romantic twist and a couple young stars on the rise? Sounds like the proper formula for a new Twilight spin-off cash cow. Well, not entirely, at least not in execution, although formula is still in question.
Hollywood has been rumaging through the dark, dank, cob web-strewn vaults of classic horror and giving it a rom-com makeover for quite a while now—vampires being the most prevalent of course. But how do you do the same thing with zombies, like in Jonathan Levine’s (50/50, The Wackness) Warm Bodies? Zombies are decaying corpses of rotten flesh, so how do you get someone to fall in love with that? Easy. You get Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class, A Single Man) as the leading mouth-breather, simply called R, with his big baby blues and dashing appeal (and maybe a tad fewer scabs than his counterparts to make the kissing just a bit more bearable). He talks by simple grunts to his one zombie friend M (Rob Corddry) but can soon eke out little words and phrases here and there. Levine made the wise choice of having R’s former human self narrate the story as he’s still somehow conscious of his life as a zombie.
Sense isn’t the strong suit of this horror-comedy as we find out that by simply eating the brains of humans, zombies can absorb all of their memories. R follows his pack into a raid on humans which leads him to chewing up a rather annoying character named Perry (Dave Franco), but then subsequently saving Perry’s girlfriend, Julie (Teresa Palmer), and leading her to safety while not slashing and eating her to nothing but guts and bones. (It’s a new kind of tale of love, folks, get used to it.) So it’s fitting, then, that movie is being released right around Valentine’s Day. Who wouldn’t want a movie that simultaneously feeds off of a stereotypical tunnel-vision male’s bloodthirst and an emotionally irrational female’s need for forbidden love? It’s the perfect answer to, “Do we see Les Mis for the fifth time in a row, or see Stallone in a movie called Bullet to the Head?”
Luckily, Warm Bodies doesn’t always take itself too seriously. Most of the outlandish plot points of this film are clearly recognized up front and taken for face value. There’s some warm moments and true laughs to be had in the middle of the film when it recognizes its crazy premise, but it curtails in the end for a very teenage-favorable gooey love fest that sort of takes itself too seriously. It also doesn’t help that we have to suffer through terrible CGI in the form of “Bonies,” which are neither as scary as real classic horror monsters or as funny as campy ones. Sort of like Levine’s 50/50 from a couple years ago, Warm Bodies has an opportunity to really take the extremes in one direction or another but chooses to hang in the middle, somewhere between wanting to make something really different and not daring to be different at all.
//
Watch the trailer for Warm Bodies below:
