Warm Bodies Review

As a huge fan of last year's moving cancer comedy 50/50, I was excited to check out director Jonathan Levine's next effort, an adaptation of Isaac Marion's novel Warm Bodies, a loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet with zombies and human survivors standing in for the Montagues and Capulets.  The film's trailer promised a fun new take on the slowly blooming zombie comedy genre (which includes the hilarious Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland), but the film fails to deliver on the promise.  Warm Bodies tries to be too many things, and the resulting hybrid doesn't fulfill any of the expectations borne of its generic checklist.  The result is a film that brings a few laughs, some squirms, but mostly discontented sighs.

Warm Bodies follows R (a great Nicholas Hoult), a zombie who can only recall the first letter of his human name, as he joins a horde of his compatriots to find dinner.  The zombies ambush a pack of young, healthy survivors scavenging for medicine outside of their protective wall, and R experiences the sharp, heart-beating pang of love at first sight upon seeing Julie (Teresa Palmer), the daughter of the humans' martial leader, General Grigio (John Malkovich, in a phoned-in performance).

The (sort-of) cross-species romance that blossoms has been done many times before, with many creatures, but surprisingly, swapping out a vampire for a zombie doesn't do much to invigorate the subgenre.  Many of the anxieties, quirks, and charms are the same as we've seen before with other monsters, albeit with a slower pace and more (though not excessive) gore. R is watchful and ever-awake, slightly creepy, somehow sweet.  He's a familiar character whose greatest asset, for viewers, is the human-voiced running narration that makes up a generous portion of the film's script.  This narration provides much of Warm Bodies' comedy, which is where we run into perhaps the film's biggest problem: the comedy rarely works.

Jonathan Levine's script is sound, though overly reliant on groan-worthy one-liners and too-easy observational humor.  The self-awareness is mostly welcome, and sometimes quite smart, as when a parallel is drawn between the pre-zombie world's techno-centric society and the ambling blankness of the apocalyptic present.  But the key to comedy is timing, and witty banter and energetic physicality are not zombies' strong suits.  Movies like Shaun of the Dead leave the bulk of the comedy to the human characters, who can wield their wide range of emotions, coherent speech, and mobility to garner laughs.  When zombies take the stage, these options are limited, if not lost, resulting in jokes that lack a timely punchline.  R's narration does its part to help alleviate this issue, but then many of the spoken jokes lack the visual accompaniment needed to really help the jokes stick the landing.  The film could use more editing to help establish a more effective rhythm.

Unfortunately, the film's other generic pursuits fail to compensate for its comedic lack.  There isn't enough action to satisfy gun nuts, and the final showdown is hampered by the poor CGI used to render the skeletal Boneys, who are zombies that are really zombified (they all get to that point eventually.  The Boneys look like enemies yanked from an uninspired PS2 game, and they look even poorer along the great make-up and costuming used on the zombies.

Of course, romance is also in play, and the film has some fun with its Shakespearean origins, with the obligatory balcony scene one of the film's highlights.  The characters are aptly named (Paris becomes Perry, Mercutio becomes Marcus, etc.), though none of them meet the fates of their theatrical counterparts.  The film is perhaps most successful as a rom-com (or zom-com, I suppose), with its meet cute, great use of music, the quirky best friends (Analeigh Tipton is the MVP of the cast, bringing the quick, cute humor the rest of the film lacks), and a wonderful makeover scene.  However, there's something off, something gross about the central relationship between R and Julie; when your romantic leads' inevitable kiss is met with "ewww"s from the crowd, something isn't working.

As Warm Bodies lurches through these varied genres, there's a notable lack of conflict.  Sure, the humans inherently hate and fear the zombies, and there's the whole issue of the two leads being different species (along with a couple more disturbing issues in their relationship), but each hurdle is cleared with relative ease.  Even R's face-off with General Grigio, a scene that should be rife with dread and danger, is anticlimactic.

It's a shame that Warm Bodies dips its toes into so many genres, because there is some solid foundational material laid here, but nothing of consequence is built upon it.  The romance, action, drama, and comedy all cancel each other out and create a weirdly inconsistent tone, rather than complementing and enhancing one another.  The result is a mixed bag that won't satisfy fans of any of the component genres.

(I should note that Warm Bodies is a month and a half away from release, so the studio could conceivably edit it and fix some of these problems, but if not, Warm Bodies will go down as an interesting, but failed, experiment.)