Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

With a title like Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, you should have a pretty clear idea of the
narrative going in, though apparently the filmmakers had murkier notions.
Directed by Russian action maven Timur Bekmanbetov (Wanted), and
incomprehensibly adapted by Seth Grahame Smith from his own hit novel, the film
takes an irresistibly daffy premise and buries it under smoke, dirt, noise and
CGI bloodbaths.

The first conceit here, and
there are many, is that the 16th president of the United States (played here by
Benjamin Walker) kept a diary of his second, nocturnal career, and narrates his
slaying adventures in his own voice. His rustic log cabin boyhood is shattered
when his mother is slain before his eyes by an unholy ghoul, and the earnest
young man sets about avenging her murder by any means necessary. Over the
years, Abe hones his prodigious mental and physical gifts for his lonely
crusade, but he doesn’t understand the true nature of his enemies until he
meets a roguish vamp hunter named Henry Sturges, played with hammy élan by
Dominic Cooper. Henry provides Abe with training, info and the names of fresh
kill targets, slowly revealing the bigger picture of the undead threat. We
learn that the entire Southern slave trade is there to enrich the vampires and
their greedy human allies, and to provide the bloodsuckers with a cheap,
disposable food source.

When not dispatching monsters
with his trusty ax, Abe, in the style of Peter Parker, has to juggle his
Springfield shop clerk job, law studies, a burgeoning political career and his
growing relationship with an enchanting socialite named Mary Todd (Mary
Elizabeth Winstead). Lincoln has a rival for her affections in slavery advocate
Stephen Douglas, though we get cheated out of seeing their legendary debates,
which might have been amusing with a supernatural twist. Sadly the script keeps
taking shortcuts and omitting historical details or real ethical questions, in
favor of dizzying, gore-drenched action scenes. The book cleverly injected
vampire myth into every triumph and tragedy of Lincoln’s familiar biography,
but the screenplay tends to erase facts and replace them with action flick
tropes.

Every piece of vampire
fiction is forced to rewrite the rules to some degree. In this instance,
sunlight is merely annoying, but silver is lethal, and the exciting, overheated
finale involves a secret Union shipment of silver bullets to the front line,
and a spectacular fight aboard a runaway train headed over a burning trestle.

Bekmanbetov never met a
slow-motion shot he didn’t love, and his frenetic, overwrought fight
choreography is arresting but ultimately tiresome when matched with a
sepia-tone-and-3-D process that creates an ugly, eye-straining image. The
director also keeps things deadly serious, to avoid being campy, but when you
recast the Great Emancipator as the Great Decapitator, it’s probably too late
to play it safe.

This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2012.