Braaaaaaains. Braaaaaaains. If only this film had more braaaaaaains.
With the Twilight franchise a memory, directors are looking to fill that sexy supernatural niche. And judging by the success of TV series The Walking Dead and now Warm Bodies, apparently the undead are now like, so fetch.
Nicholas Hoult (About A Boy, Skins) is pale new pin-up, R. The young zombie is enamoured with Julie (Teresa Palmer, I Am Number Four), the girlfriend of one of his victims. Taking her back to the zombie-ridden airport he calls home, R hides Julie in an abandoned 747. She talks, he moans and tries not to be creepy. Some extremely mild jokes are made and a new genre is created: the zom-rom-com.
There are flashes of wit from director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, 50/50), who adapted the story from Isaac Marion’s novel. A wry voiceover from Hoult lets us access the internal life of this not-so-mindless corpse. An ingenious touch sees R absorbing the memories and emotions of his victims when he eats their brains. Through flashback, and R’s imagination, a nice poignancy is created, as he dreams of a life that could have been.
As in The Wackness, Levine utilises music to convey the characters’ emotions. R plays The Black Keys’ ‘Lonely Boy’, Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Shelter From The Storm’ in an attempt to woo Julie.
All of that said, Warm Bodies is incredibly underwhelming. The cheap make-up and teen romance plotline feel more suited to a television special. SNL veteran Rob Corrdry is wasted as R’s zombie pal, and John Malkovich phones in a shouty performance as leader of the surviving humans. Not my cup of blood.