Warm
Bodies tries to do something that I feel pretty safe in saying
has never been done in a movie before. They
take the usual run of the mill zombie movie and basically turn it into a
romantic comedy. This is a concept that
really shouldn’t work but against all odds it does thanks to a witty script,
likeable lead characters and a talented comedic director in Jonathan Levine
(50/50).
In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, a zombie simply
named R (Nicholas Hoult) spends the majority of his days walking around an
abandoned airport and sometimes hanging out with his best friend M (Rob Corddry). One day R, M, and several other zombies
decide to take a trip into the nearby city in search of some new victims to
eat. Eventually, they find a group of
humans led by Perry (Dave Franco) and his girlfriend Julie (Teresa Palmer) who
are out searching for medical supplies. R
quickly kills Perry and starts eating his brains which gives R all of Perry’s
thoughts and memories. Eating Perry’s
brains also causes R to instantly fall in love with Julie and decides to rescue
her from the wrath of the other zombies instead of killing her. In an effort to spend more time with Julie, R
convinces her to hide out in the abandoned airplane he lives in. As the two grow closer, R slowly becomes more
and more human which also begins to rub off on his fellow zombies including M
and it isn’t long before Julie begins falling for R as well.
While R and Julie have some nice chemistry as the two
star crossed lovers, I still thought their romance moved unrealistically
fast. Julie reacts to Perry’s death not
so much with sadness but with a rather disturbing indifference. Whenever anybody tries to console her over
the death of her long term boyfriend she mostly shrugs it off with the same
amount of emotion as someone who forgot to pay their water bill. Once he’s dead she moves on from it quicker
than a trophy wife in one of those Lifetime movies. Afterward she seems to warm up to the idea of
getting into a relationship with a dead guy alarmingly fast, not even really
caring that much when R eventually admits that he was the one who killed Perry. I have to admit though that despite my gripes
over the speed of which their relationship progresses Hoult and Palmer both
work off each other well enough that I was willing to overlook it for the most
part.
I have to admit that even though I’m not really a fan of
Rob Corddry, his role as the zombie M is easily the best part of the
movie. Besides getting the best
one-liners, even as a zombie he proves to be the best actor here (Hoult acts a
little too human to be a truly believable zombie and John Malkovich goes into
default mode by chewing the scenery). When
he’s a zombie I find him believable as a zombie and when he begins to turn back
into a human I find him believable as a human.
The idea alone of Warm
Bodies borders on completely ridiculous but Levine more than manages to
pull it off. He has proven before with 50/50 that he knows how to balance
comedy and drama and here he offers more of the same. He makes R sympathetic without making him
pitiful and he makes Julie vulnerable without making her helpless. Most of all he seems to acknowledge that
their romance is weird but he somehow keeps it from being creepy.
Despite the odd premise, clever writing and excellent
directing elevates Warm Bodies into a
surprisingly entertaining and funny film.
Grade: B+
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