In this age of “The Walking Dead,” finding a new angle on the zombie subgenre is fairly difficult. The lurching ghouls have been used to comment on racial tensions (“Night of the Living Dead”), consumer culture (“Dawn of the Dead”) and post-9/11 panic (“28 Days Later”). Even the idea of a zombie comedy is largely played out, thanks to “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland.”
So credit should be given to Jonathan Levine for finding a somewhat unique spin on a played-out trope with “Warm Bodies.” Based on young-adult novel by Isaac Marion, the film takes the unique approach of making one of the undead our romantic hero. Even though the film gets mired in cliché and throws many of the traditional zombie-movie rules out the window, there’s enough cleverness and heart to keep it from devolving fully into the “Twilight” zone.
The film takes place in an America decimated by the zombie apocalypse. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a young walker who’s content to shuffle aimlessly around an empty airport, trade grunts with his best friend (Rob Cordry) and munch on brains. When he meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), a young survivor scavenging for medical supplies with her boyfriend, R is smitten and feels the stirrings of love begin to bring him back to life—literally. Taking Julie captive, R decides not to devour her but rather see if she’ll fall in love with him…something that’s not easy when you’re a monosyllabic corpse who just ate the brains of your crush’s boyfriend.
It’s an odd concept, and one that doesn’t entirely work. But Levine, who helmed the wonderful “50/50,” introduces some clever and surprisingly touching elements into the story.
Chief among them is the idea that zombies may have some sense of awareness, even if they still just mindlessly shuffle around and grunt. We’re privy to R’s thoughts through voice-over, which mainly makes predictable jokes about how slow zombies move but also builds affection for a hero who would otherwise just be another corpse. There’s also the idea that zombies absorb the memories of their victims, which allows R to learn more information about Julie but also allows Levine to showcase ideas of what being human really means through showing her boyfriend’s memories. These sequences could have been simple expository devices but instead are filled with warmth, contrasting human moments against the film’s bleak backdrop.
Levine knows how to balance the film’s grim setting with sweetness and humor. There’s a bit of edgy dark humor to the movie’s first half, which balances R’s detached thoughts on zombie life with scenes of destruction. Hout (“About a Boy” and “X-Men: First Class”) is able to convey teenage angst while walking around slack-jawed and vacant (or maybe the two aren’t that dissimilar), and the early scenes where he tries to impress Julie are funny and sweet without becoming creepy or goofy—something that I’m sure is difficult in a film about zombie/human love. Another refreshing twist is that it’s the rare zombie movie that discusses a cure, and some of the film’s most resonant moments are where hordes of zombies, touched by expressions of love, begin to show signs of life — particularly Cordry’s character, who gets some of the movie’s funniest moments.
R and Julie eventually try to return to the city, where they hope to convince Julie’s father (John Malkovich) that the zombies are changing. Unfortunately, it’s here that the film drops its most intriguing elements and becomes a predictable riff on “Romeo and Juliet.” The film so easily shifts Julie from scared victim to love-struck teen without having her wrestle with important things, like the fact that her boyfriend’s dead and her new boyfriend is mostly dead, too. For a film that was so clever early on, it’s disappointing to see it shift to such a standard, weightless romantic comedy. When the movie resorted to Palmer putting makeup on R with “Pretty Woman” playing the background, I gave up, although I’ll give the film credit for commenting about the cliché music choice.
One reason the love story doesn’t stick is that Palmer isn’t given much to do other than look cute. For someone growing up in such grim times, she still looks and acts just like any other romantic leading lady. Julie talks about living in a world where her friends regularly die but there’s no sense of hardness or sorrow to her. Without that pathos, I never bought her character’s arc or felt that the Julie and R’s romance was genuine. When I can’t buy the romance in a romantic comedy, something’s wrong.
The film’s final act builds to a perfunctory battle where zombies and humans fight walking skeletons rendered with horrible digital effects. Everything is on autopilot, direct from the teenage supernatural romance handbook, and the film’s uniqueness disappears. Even worse, Malkovich—one of our most reliable actors—is relegated to the overprotective father role, utterly wasted in a movie just calling out for him to go a little crazy. Where the film could have found big laughs and energy, it instead lurches to its predictable romantic finale.
It’s telling that in the final sequence, which posits that perhaps zombies and humans can live together, the only smile earned was from Cordry’s character. Julie and R, of course, get their happily-ever-after, but by then they’ve transformed into teenage love story clichés. Personally, I would have been happier for the movie to let R retain a little undeadness. He was more lifelike that way.
Originally published in the Advisor and Source Newspapers.
