Critics Fall for Zombie Love in Warm Bodies

Given the popularity shambling corpses enjoy these days, it was only a matter of time before we got Warm Bodies, an honest-to-goodness zombie romantic comedy, in which a member of the living dead ("R") falls for a still-breathing girl ("Julie," get it?). And believe it or not, most critics actually think it's kind of sweet. Here's what they're saying:

• "I kinda love this movie," confesses Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times. "A lot of zombie movies have heart—but usually the heart ends up on someone's plate." Not this time. Warm Bodies had "the, um, guts to be unabashedly romantic and unapologetically optimistic." Its look inside the mind of one of the undead makes for "a bloody fresh twist on the most popular horror genre of this century."

• "I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole," quips Ty Burr at the Boston Globe, but this is an enjoyable flick anyway. "The humor's there, and the insights, such as they are, are tart." And despite the obvious parallels, Bodies' protagonists "are too sharp to be anybody's Edward and Bella."
• "Warm Bodies is cute and amusing enough to catch on cable one day," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. You've seen this plot: "Zombie meets girl. Zombie loses girl. Zombie—well, you know the rest," and the action scenes are familiar "off-the-shelf" stuff, but it's a "sweet relief from the apocalyptic freakout" of The Walking Dead.
• But Kyle Smith at the New York Post can't help picking nits in the movie's ragged logic, and wasn't charmed by the plot. "Could opposites attract? Could love save the world? Could this script be any more trite?" he writes. "I can hear the 14-year-olds: 'Shut up! Can’t you see how beautiful R and Julie's love is?' Despite the loads of my-soul-is-abloom emo on the soundtrack, no."

(More zombies stories.)