Movie Review: Warm Bodies

Graphic evocation of feeling on leaving cinema.

Warm Bodies opens with a narration from the guy who was that kid in About A Boy (or respect due, the guy from Skins, A Single Man and X-Men: First Class); cue an awful sinking feeling. We’re spoon-fed exposition from a movie not smart enough to go about things in any other way, and more than anything the first attempts at humour are crushingly painful.  Nicholas Hoult plays a zombie. He is a microcosm for the rotten corpse of a movie around him and fumbles through with diligence but there is nothing new to say here about zombies and no material for Hoult to impress us with.  He and his zombie cohorts lumber around and with every lurch and groan make watching them so much work.

Not that those playing humans are much in the way of contrast. Hollywood is no doubt a brutal place and the young blonde thing stuck in as the love interest (Teresa Palmer) has made it up through the ranks, but there is no chance for any plaudits of ‘break-out star’ or ‘best thing about’; she has to slop her way through the quick-buck cynicism that leeches off the pages of the original book and this movie that unfortunately followed. She’s no Buffy – not even the quality of gal Buffy was invented to take the piss out of! – there’s little to remark on. We could go down the road of wondering why she would be drawn to this drip of a dead-man but this might suggest there are things worth discussing about this movie. There are not.

The makers have failed so utterly that they could not even tarnish good material by borrowing from it;  they have instead pillaged already piss-poor source material and set new lows in diminishing returns. That there was enough material to fill a book is flabbergasting; the story here is in 3 unimaginative parts and without a smack of sophistication or intelligence inserts one-line explanations, music to create sentiment, and events that don’t leave you angry or bewildered, just jaded. Dave Franco, minor role or not, we expect more of you. Everyone else, don’t let me see you around these parts again.