Dull, dull, dull, dreary, twee, dull. Take only the kids you don't like!

Rating: 2/10 (25 July 2013)

Warm Bodies opens with a long, rambling, interminable voice-over from sort-of-zombie, R (Nicholas Hoult). I say 'sort of' because here the rules of being a zombie have changed and R's kind of zombie is known as a 'corpse', as opposed to a 'skeleton' (the very bad zombies). And maybe 'interminable' isn't quite correct; it certainly feels endless but is interspersed with snatches of dialogue from the group of teenagers sent out from their walled city to collect medical supplies for their community.
However, 30 minutes in, a full third of the movie, I was ready to start eating my toes just for a little excitement. It did pick up the barest hint of a heartbeat in the final third but, rather than opting for action, it wandered of in the direction of twee twaddle.
R thinks. He explains in painful, trudging detail how he sees something more than regular zombies. He tells us about his best friend, M (Rob Corddry), another zombie he meets occasionally in the airport where they live, to stare and grunt at each other. Occasionally, apparently, they manage to utter a complete word. Then, while eating her boyfriend's brain, R sees Julie (Teresa Palmer), falls in love, takes her home, and begins evolving at an astonishing rate. Love, it transpires, can bring you back from the dead.
But all good love stories need a dark side and here we have two: First up are the skeletons, those zombies who have given up all hope, ripped off their skin and are in it just for the bloodshed; then there's Grigio (John Malkovich), big daddy of the walled city and father of, dumb dumb dummmmm, Julie. In traditional, two-dimensional style, Grigio has forgotten how to show love, is unpleasant, won't listen to reason and just wants to kill zombies.
And so it goes on. For 98 minutes that feel like a lifetime in purgatory.
Warm Bodies is dull. It establishes its pace (deathly crawl) and maintains it for all but the final fifteen minutes. Writer/director Jonathon Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) forgets to explain or make the evolution reasonable. In the space of a few minutes the corpses go from grunting the odd intelligible word to communicating in staccato sentences, gesticulating and running smoothly.
The makeup is awful, the CGI for the skeletons looks like something Ray Harryhausen produced 60 years ago with his hands, the acting is ropey to say the least and the script hasn't so much been written as slapped together with papier-mâché.
Maybe Warm Bodies suffers by emerging in the wake of the excellent, bloodthirsty The Walking Dead. Maybe it's just because it's dull, tedious, twee and annoying. Did I say it's also dull?
Come back Twilight, all is forgiven. Better still, roll on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Let's have the return of teen movies that understand their demographic actually has a brain.
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