‘Warm Bodies’ is light entertainment

Warm Bodies is a perfectly average movie.

A base hit of a film, it won’t be changing anyone’s life or making it onto many top 10 lists. What it will do, however, is provide a good hour and 37 minutes of entertainment and sometimes, that’s all you really need.

Warm Bodies tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie living in the post-apocalyptic near-future.

R has no memories of his existence before he died, but he is self-aware and furnishes his airplane home with items that make him feel alive, most notably an extensive record collection.

Like other zombies, R is driven by an insatiable hunger to eat human beings, in particular their brains. R and his fellow zombies do this because eating a person’s brain allows them to experience that persons memories and feel human again.

When R eats the brain of Perry Kelvin (Dave Franco), he begins to develop feelings for Dave’s girlfriend, Julie Grigio (Teresa Palmer), and instead of eating her, R takes her back to his home. From there, R and Julie begin to form a connection, setting off a chain of events that has the potential to change their world forever.

The first thing Warm Bodies manages to do right is not be bad, and when you consider that it’s, at least partially, trying to capitalize on the Twilight craze, that’s no small feat.

Hoult provides some good physical comedy and an excellent dry voice over in the main role, while John Malkovich is his usual humorless self as the leader of the humans. The key performance of the movie, however, comes from Palmer as Julie.

Although Warm Bodies isn’t free of all the problematic elements that come with a monster kidnapping a woman in order for her to fall in love with him, Palmer manages to play Julie as a strong character, who is competent and not overly reliant on R. This gives their romance some parity, as well as some give and take, which, in my view, is essential to the movie’s success.

The overall story is also pretty strong. The film is essentially Beauty and the Beast, and the filmmakers wisely choose to let the fundamentals of this archetypal plot work themselves out. Hoult and Palmer have good chemistry, and the supporting cast is well-utilized to highlight this.

The world building here is also pretty solid.

Like Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Warm Bodies plays its central premise pretty straight, despite it being a romantic comedy and having many funny parts.

Had it approached its post-apocalyptic future with too much irony, or been sloppy when creating the world in which it is set, this wouldn’t have worked out. Instead, this movie has the distinction of never letting its plot points knock you out of the action, despite the fact that a number of them are quite fantastical.

While Warm Bodies may be unremarkable on most fronts, it does have one absolutely excellent quality, and that is its soundtrack.

Seriously, the song choices here aren’t just good, they are great, and they really add to the enjoyableness of this film.

This movie isn’t going to be changing anyone’s life, and if the idea of a romantic comedy crossed with a zombie movie doesn’t sound appealing to you, then you should probably skip it, because that’s what this is.

On the other hand, if you are looking for entertaining light fare, a good flick to see with a group of friends or a date movie, Warm Bodies may be just what the zombie doctor ordered.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on February 14, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Columns,Movie Reviews,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry