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63It wants to be funny, charming, scary, and dramatic. It ends up being a little of each but not successful as any one.
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50The script is too primly PG-13 to really go for it. Warm Bodies even suggests that true love can help the right zombie grow a new heart. That's a con job that makes Bodies lukewarm at best.
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50There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.
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75At this point in the actor's career, it is pretty well impossible to tell when Malkovich is camping it up, or just being John Malkovich. Under the end-of-civilization circumstances of Warm Bodies, he's just the right guy for the job.
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75I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole, but I can say that Warm Bodies pulls off a pretty impressive trick: It has its "Twilight" and goofs on it too.
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75An enjoyably clever and cartoonishly gory rom-zom-com.
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75What Levine does have is a gently gruesome way of amusing us, converting the uneasiness of a wooer from another species into the everyday anxieties of a young man around a girl he likes.
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63Levine has a strong instinct as a packager of moments, ladling on the alt-rock just so before ladling on another ladle's worth.
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50Warm Bodies is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed.
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63Warm Bodies is for audiences who prefer stories about mending hearts to munching brains, and ideally, for girls who aren't quite sure yet if they want a slightly scary boyfriend, or a living doll they can dress up.
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83Levine – whose last picture was the intriguing, if only partly effective, cancer comedy “50/50” — is going for something more here, exploring what makes us human by contrasting it with a character who has lost all the basics and is desperate to get them back.
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50The leads are likeable enough, but the script reanimates "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" tactics - a monster story supposedly made hilarious by being told by a savvy high schooler. These lines aren't even jokes, though, they're just collisions of the brutal and the banal.
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70Warm Bodies is an improbable romance sweetened with appealing performances and buoyed by one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy.
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37Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.
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63Zombie lore doesn't allow for redemption, only head shots, and Levine's film, amusing though it may be, is never gory enough to truly become a classic zombie movie. It also ignores the one basic necessity of monster films, even the funny ones: It really ought to be creepy or scary or gross, at least once or twice.
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78With "50/50," his last stint in the director's chair, Levine upended convention to make a feel-good cancer movie. He's still defying expectations: In animating the inner workings of the undead, he's made a movie that is both clever and heartfelt.
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50For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.
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67It's got a big heart and high spirits on a low budget and actors who refuse to phone it in.
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80In doing a little genre bending of romantic schmaltz and horror cheese - some fundamental zombie mythology is turned on its head - the film breathes amusing new life into both.
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70The low gore quotient and emphasis on young love might disappoint genre purists, but for those open to the idea of a gently goofy mash-up, the film is strong on atmosphere and offers likably low-key, if somewhat bland, charms.
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80Warm Bodies is the first movie worth paying to see in theaters this year. It’s an inventive charmer that visits all the typical movie scenarios of young love amid chaos and disaster, but with a new dimension: one of the romantic leads is a zombie.
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70There's not a lot of gore - or even suspense - in Warm Bodies, and the script plays fast and loose with the zombie rules invented by "Night of the Living Dead" creator George Romero. But director Jonathan Levine's area of expertise is confused-young-men comedies like "The Wackness" and "50/50," so he really gets this hero's predicament.
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50Though it's about a pair of lovers whose passion is strong enough to break down the barriers between life and death, this mildly amusing, sort-of-sweet comedy is strangely sexless and passion-free-these bodies, whether human or zombie, feel room-temperature at best.
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60Zombie-ism in the movies is traditionally inspected for metaphorical qualities. Here it could simply be that we males are emotionally dead … until love revives us.
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63Jonathan "50/50" Levine has turned Isaac Marion's teen romance novel into an often amusing tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy - tongue in cheek, and brains in teeth. Chewy, tasty brains.
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50Geared for teens who perhaps found the Twilight series too profound, Warm Bodies is an unabashed homage to that wildly successful franchise. One of its stars, Teresa Palmer, is even done up to be a carbon copy of Kristen Stewart, the anchor of the vampire series.
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80Hoping to do for flesh-eaters what "The Twilight Saga" did for vampires, albeit on a smaller scale, writer-director Jonathan Levine spins Isaac Marion's novel into a broadly appealing date movie about a zombified Romeo and his lively Juliet.
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50Playing with genre is fine, but if you're going to create new rules, you have to play by them too, but unfortunately Warm Bodies continually subverts its own internal logic and basic, believable character motivation to keep pushing the movie along.
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50If you're a zombie purist or a fan of "The Walking Dead," Warm Bodies is not for you.
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80Somewhere between the pop-culture deconstruction of "Zombieland" and the skewed romance of "(500) Days Of Summer," this manages to make the apocalypse seem charming. Warm is the right word.
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Feb 9, 201360A Frankenstein’s monster of comedy, romance and horror that’s less than its parts, Warm Bodies entertains but underwhelms.
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Feb 4, 201330For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.
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Jan 31, 201330The film's intentions are way too good for its own good, producing bloodless romance and more shamefully bloodless carnage.
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Jan 31, 201340Warm Bodies wants us to believe in the transformative power of love, but what of Julie's poor, devoured boyfriend? There's Stockholm syndrome, and then there's cozying up to the monster who ate your sweetheart.
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Jan 31, 201360Hoult's genuinely awkward charm and Palmer's tomboyish wholesomeness disarm an audience overfamiliar with this story. The two ably communicate the primitive and irrational feelings of falling in love.
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Jan 31, 201380There isn't a cynical bone in this film's achingly sincere body. And it's not really a horror movie, unless the "horror" in question is the all-consuming awkwardness of young love.
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Jan 31, 201375It flouts convention in a number of ways in service of its genre-mash-up agenda while still contributing something original to the tradition of the zombie film.
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Jan 30, 201388A well-paced, nicely directed, post-apocalyptic love story with a terrific sense of humor and the, um, guts to be unabashedly romantic and unapologetically optimistic.