Warm Bodies
(USA, 98 min.)
Written and directed by Jonathan Levin
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich,
Analeigh Tipton, Rob Cordry, Dave Franco.
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Teresa Palmer and Nicholas Hoult star in Warm Bodies Courtesy of eOne Films. |
Zombieo, Zombieo,
wherefore art thou, Zombieo? Shakespeare’s corpse goes on a ravenous
rampage in Warm Bodies, a bizarre and
bloodless retread of Romeo and Juliet.
This loose play on the classical tale is as lifeless as a zombie. Warm Bodies is a zombie itself in the unending
wave of unthinking and immobile zombie pics.
Fates collide when R meets Julie (Teresa Palmer). Julie, a
human and the daughter of the anti-corpse corps (her father is played by John
Malkovich), is a gun-toting corpse killer until R saves her from a flesh-eating
feast. Julie saves R in turn, as he shows signs of life with each little
heartbeat that twitters for the blonde babe.
It’s hard to share R’s rapid pulse for the predictable and,
frankly, irritating Warm Bodies. It’s
a disappointing product from writer/director Levine, who showed such a spark
for life, drama, and comedy in last year’s 50/50
and the 2008 gem The Wackness. Warm Bodies spends too much time
marinating in its own self-consciousness. R’s incessant voice-over, for one
thing, is a zombie-punch to the brain, while the awkward and distracting
soundtrack unleashes a wave of alt-rock hits that were hip when the film
started production. The film makes ample winks to zombie conventions and human
disconnection, too, but it’s so concerned with being self-aware and with avoiding
easy categorization that it forgets to be funny, romantic, or scary. Zombie
films have simply depleted their supply of brains.
An allegory for mankind’s own living deadness, zombies have
conveyed virtually the same message since George A. Romero’s cult classic Night of the Living Dead. Bitten by the
bug of capital gain, filmmakers have caught on to the zombie zeitgeist—if one
can even call it that—that has exploded into a cultural phenomenon. People roam
the streets in make-up for Zombiewalks as some sort of political protest. The
actually reason of becoming a zombie seems superfluous, since nobody pretending
to be dead ever articulates the reason for the public charade. A zombie is just
a hipster with a different funk.
A most hipster-friendly zombie movie, Warm Bodies says nothing new, but it has an ample supply of hair
products to keep the corpses nice and tousled with dead-head. Like the
Zombie-walkers, Warm Bodies follows a
trend merely for the sake of keeping up with the times. Levine presents a
zombieland in which signs of intelligent life are scarce, aside from a playful “’Sup?”
from Analeigh Tipton (Damsels in Distress),
who is a lot of fun as Julie’s fellow humanoid.
Warm Bodies offers
nothing fresh with the genre—zombie comedies are so 2009—and its pithy attempt
with the Romeo and Juliet ploy never
develops into anything good. Star-crossed humans and zombies were just never
meant to mingle. Unthinking zombies will love the film, though, and perhaps the
news of Richard III’s parking lot burial may inspire a whole wave of
Shakespearean monster movies. King Richard has a lot more menace than the love-struck
Romeo does, anyways.
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Warm Bodies is currently playing in wide release.