Warm Bodies

I guess there are minor spoilers here.  Thematic spoilers, mostly.

So it’s basically Romeo and Juliet with zombies and an unmitigated happy ending.  But in my case, I couldn’t really get past the Stockholm Syndrome romance.  You know the one — the creepy borderline psychotic  the hero kidnaps rescues the woman who ought to be freaking out the open-hearted heroine, who sees the goodness within him and realizes they were meant to be together.  Yeah, getting kind of tired of this.  (Though I’d suddenly like to see a gender swapped version that doesn’t end up like Misery.  You know, Manic Pixie Dreamgirl kidnaps, or rather “kidnaps,” a cute but intellectually vague guy…)

Movies like this also remind me why I don’t go to comedies much.  I’m sitting there stewing, smirking at the so-called jokes while the rest of the audience is laughing whole-heartedly.  And when I do laugh (exactly one and a half times in this movie), no one else in the theater generally does, which makes me feel like a total freak.  (Meanwhile, I think Hansel and Gretel, with its whopping 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, is hysterical.)

This isn’t a bad movie.  Nicholas Hoult is pretty much brilliant as R and carries the movie all by himself.  But it could have been so much more.  It could have gone in some really interesting directions, but decided to go John Hughes lite instead.  Which mostly tells me that I’m just not the target audience.

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