Warm Bodies

Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl again. Boy gets eaten by corpse; corpse meets girl. Corpse gets girl. Corpse loses girl. Corpse gets girl again.

This is the formula used by Jonathan Levine for his brain-bespattered romantic zombie comedy. The genre does indeed exist. “Warm Bodies,” a take on the walking dead, trades in the traditional gory shock value for a romance between the groaning hipster, R (Nicholas Hoult) and the tough girl love interest Julie (Teresa Palmer.) Unfortunately, the only thing that moves slower than the shuffling of the monsters is the already-tepid relationship between the two.

To Levine’s credit, he jumpstarts his plot right from the get-go. Dispatched from the inevitable last human enclave to get some much-needed medicine, Julie, her boyfriend (a very dry Dave Franco) and various others make their way through the abandoned streets of a presumably once-thriving metropolis. The group is attacked by R and his gang of groaners, mayhem ensues, R gets his first heart-stopping (or starting) look at Julie, and then quickly and conveniently dispatches her boyfriend and eats his brains.

So it goes.

For reasons unexplained, but useful to the plot, R isn’t your typical zombie. Not only does he possess an ironic interior monologue, he also collects vinyl and is as cute as a button once you look past the rotting eyelids and decaying flesh. This is all very lucky for Julie, to whom R takes a fancy and whisks back to his love abode: an abandoned 747, where he houses her and teaches her the art of zombie love.

An hour and a half later and there’s no progression beyond the moans and awkward staring. I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that I found this very comparable to a typical middle school relationship. The two even share a stiff dance with one another, which you may or may not liken to your own Sadie Hawkins experiences.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments, like after Julie abandons R for her own people, the broken hearted zombie is consoled by the sage words of his best friend: “bitches, man.” But most of the film’s humor tries too hard to be witty in order to appeal to its teenage or 20-something crowd.

What’s left is a lot of dry sentiment, a happy ending and some predictable archetypes: John Malkovich as General Grigio, Julie’s father as the shoot-first-ask-questions-later leader of survivors and the zombies as the horde of sensitive monsters just trying to find their way home.