Review: ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’

Almost since the beginning of cinema, books have been adapted for movies, easy fodder for new stories to tell on the big screen, and sometimes the results are great, and sometimes they are pretty awful. Many of these adaptations fall somewhere in the middle, wallowing in mediocrity. This particular adaptation, the one of Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” unfortunately can only wish it was in this expansive middle ground, existing as fun yet easily disposable entertainment. No, instead “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is a dreadful film, with a loosely strung together story and just some of the most hideous and unappealing cinematography ever for a big budget summer movie.

The story starts with very young Abraham Lincoln witnessing the death of his mother at the hands of some guy, it the long run it doesn’t really matter who this guy is, he’s just the guy that kills little Abe’s mama. So Abe grows up into a lanky young man (Benjamin Walker, Kinsey) hell bent on vengeance against this killer, and through these actions he stumbles across a countrywide vampire plot to take over the nation. So naturally some guy named Henry (Dominic Cooper) takes Abe in and trains him to become a silver-tipped axe twirling vampire hunter. And thus begins the secret monster-slaying life of our 16^th President, his personal battles against the vampire menace eventually culminating in the US Civil War.

When it’s put like that, it sounds like a deliriously fun and interesting idea, and indeed it worked quite well in novel form. But the story changed quite a bit from page to screen (which is a little weird since Grahame-Smith wrote the screenplay himself), and the changes are the kind that take away the details and interesting characters and replace them with big action set pieces and a less ambiguous and challenging story. From the ridiculous “learning how to wield an axe and fight vampires” training montage to the thirty-year flash forward that skips over that whole pesky Lincoln becomes a politician and then a president deal, this story is so clumsily and haphazardly told that dump trucks could drive through the huge holes in the plot.

In book form, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is a fun read, detailed and layered in a pretty smart well, and contains an interest mash up of vampire horror and American history. But so many of these details are excised, and the story is stripped down to its most basic idea – Lincoln hates vampires, wants to kill them, and then kills them. And without all of the details and connective tissue that made the novel work, the movie is just a thinly plotted mess, more intent on trying to show off cool moments of action than actually try to tell a good story, which is weird considering the story in the book is already good, so why didn’t they just stick to their guns? Why did they feel compelled to turn this into some huge action spectacle and totally ignore the things that made the book work?

And that action, good golly; if it was good action, that would be one thing, but the action scenes in this movie are murky, dust covered CGI-riddled garbage, and consistently the most ludicrous parts of this already insanely ludicrous movie. There’s a chase sequence that inexplicably and without rhyme or reason involves a horse stampede, and though this scene does give us the amazing sight of a vampire swinging a horse around by one leg and throwing said horse at Lincoln, only to have Lincoln roll with the horse and manage to flip on top of it and ride it, it’s mostly a horrible hodge-podge of digital pixels. Like most of the action scenes in this film, everything is covered in a dust cloud, which coupled with the soft focus, gives everything an incredibly murky and ugly appearance. And obviously director Timur Bekmambetov loves “300” because he speed ramps the hell out of his action scenes, often with no logic or reason, but simply because it should “look cool.” But most of it doesn’t look cool, it just looks like a garbled mess, much like the rest of the movie.

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” could have been a fun, entertaining film, but it’s so tone deaf and insipid that it’s hard to enjoy, not even on the level of so bad, it’s good. Instead it’s just bad, up there with some of the worst big budget summer movies ever released. What a wasted opportunity this turned out to be.