REVIEW OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER

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About The Movie: 

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a 2012 American action fantasy horror film based on the 2010 mashup novel of the same name. The film was directed and co-produced by Timur Bekmambetov, along with Tim Burton. The novel's author, Seth Grahame-Smith, wrote the adapted screenplay. The real-life figure Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States(1861–1865), is portrayed in the novel and the film as having a secret identity as a vampire hunter. Lincoln first began his hunting expeditions because, as a boy, he saw those suckers go after slaves. (They're all white, these vampires.) When he intervened to save a little black friend, they went after his own mother. And when he became a man — the adult Lincoln is played by Benjamin Walker with a look of perpetually stricken self-effacement — he committed himself to the eradication of the infernal species, under the tutelage of a rogue good vampire named Henry Sturgess.

What Is Good About The Movie:

Vampire Hunter is both more arty-handsome than the concept warrants, and less out-there than it ought to be.

This movie has the opportunity to be crazy-absurd. With the notion of slave owners as the world's true vampires, it has the possibility of making stirring political analogies. With the bloody agonies of the Civil War as its centerpiece — Lincoln makes his Gettysburg Address in the middle — the picture could have been a shriek against the ghoulishness of battle. And with so much flesh crunching and bloodletting, it could have been a bit too much, but I LOVE a good vamp kill.

At its best, this movie unfurl like color-blasted fever dreams: A silhouetted Lincoln chases a vampire across a stampede of horses smeared in dusty orange. The blood from the president’s ax morphs into a pen stroke in the journal that recounts his superhero antics. As villainous Adam uncorks a history of vampires through the ages, paintings morph into blood-sucking thugs.

What Is Bad About The Movie:

But visual virtuosity can only take a film so far. The time-fractured fight choreography grows tiresome, muddied by a strange color palette that alternately bathes characters in blue, filters scenes through sepia-toned earth hues or blasts everything with an orange-and-brown aura. The cumulative effect is atmsophere-over-story overkill.

Bearing the most outrageous movie title in recent memory, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter sounds like a world-class exploitation flick that would make the average moviegoer proud. I would think that this would be a movie that you can’t seriously, however TPB took this movie VERY seriously, staging a glum, if visually spectacular, drama enacted by skillful performers who display not a glimmer of disbelief about the absurd notion that our nation’s Great Emancipator left a trail of beheaded vampires in his wake.

History buffs might appreciate the savvy incorporation of biographical milestones into the R-rated movie, but that’s not the problem. The real drag about the movie is that, in the face of such an audacious premise, nobody on screen seems to be having much fun. To be fair, the real Lincoln was no barrel of laughs. He suffered lengthy bouts of profound depression and agonized over the cost of war. However star Benjamin Walker goes deep into that zone once he grows a beard and assumes the weighty role during the movie’s climactic chapter.

Vampire Hunter’s supporting characters could have added some auxiliary comedic juice to the intrinsically outlandish setup, but the decision to play everything straight dooms the movie to the trash heap of boring cinema. Villainy comes courtesy of fiery English actor Rufus Sewell, whose centuries-old leader of Vampire Nation looks dashing with fresh red blood dripping down his crisp white shirt, but he never gets to unload the kind of gloriously ornery speech that defines the best bad guys.

Then there’s Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd. By all accounts a feisty firecracker filled with piss and vinegar, she’s played here by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as merely pleasant for most of the film.

Vampire Hunter‘s bland characters are rescued from the tedium by regular infusions of color-blasted action sequences heavily dosed in slow-it-down/speed-it-up camera tricks.

Overall Grade:

C+