Warm Bodies

Jonathan Levine seems so seduced by the smart premise of his lazy Warm Bodies – tortured hipster zombie starts romance with live and kicking plague survivor – that he's forgotten to put any meat on its bones. Rotting or otherwise.

Nicholas Hoult is the re-animated ‘R,’ shuffling about his abandoned airport home and indulging in grunt-only chitchat with chum ‘M’ (Corddry). ‘R’ has a cognisance at odds with those dwindling deadite motor skills, however; his teen-angsty internal monologue provides the film’s fitfully amusing narration. On a trip to town for some din-dins, ‘R’ and his buddies encounter a reconnaissance team from the last human outpost. Slaying and feasting on most, our hero spares one victim's girlfriend, Julie (Palmer), and whisks her back to his lair for her own safety. Oddly, she’s okay with that.

Though Hoult and Palmer are likeable enough in their roles, and the wry soundtrack raises a smirk, Levine’s script from Isaac Marion’s novel is maddeningly slapdash. Aside from not being particularly funny (Corddry grabs all the rare zingers), there’s a number of spectacular failures of logic in plotting, while the myriad allusions to Romeo & Juliet (balcony scene included) serve only as unwelcome reminders of how great drama works. It’s difficult to shake a suspicion of cynicism from this production. Thrown together and laughably bloodless, its only reason for existing seems to be to cash in on a tween obsession with the romantic entanglements of the semi-living. A disappointment from the man at the helm of 2006’s fierce and witty All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. [Chris Fyvie]