Playing Lincoln is Benjamin Walker (“Flags of Our Fathers”), who has presumably been cast for both his striking physical resemblance to the man himself and his stunning athleticism. His role is a physically demanding one, which not many actors who have played Lincoln could honestly say about their role. This Lincoln twirls an axe between his fingers like a baton-twirler wielding a metal rod. He leaps between tumbling train carriages atop a burning bridge. He even chases down a chuckling vampire while skillfully running atop a stampede of computer-generated horses. Again, not many actors who have played Lincoln could truthfully say they’ve done any of that in the role. Benjamin Walker can.
In “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," Honest Abe’s story begins in Perry County, Indiana, where his beloved mother is nibbled upon during the night by an intruder while nine-year-old Abraham watches in horror. This intruder is Jack Barts (Martin Csokas, “Dream House”), a sadistic land owner to whom Abraham’s father owes a hefty debt which he cannot pay. Jack is of course a vampire, but little Abraham doesn’t know this yet - he is in fact unaware of their existence. Abraham’s mother dies from the bite (strangely, she doesn’t rise from the grave as a member of the undead - I think I may have missed something), and Abraham swears bloody revenge.
Seven years later, Abraham is ready to exact his vengeance, but upon confrontation he is very nearly killed by the vampiric Jack. Luckily, he is saved from near-death by a heroic Englishman named Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper, “The Devil’s Double”). Henry informs Abraham that he is a vampire hunter and takes Abraham on as his apprentice, training him in the art of vampire-hunting. And so Abraham becomes a killer of all those who are fanged and blood-thirsty, knocking on vampires’ front doors with his fingers tightly clenching the wood of his trusty axe (which triples up as a shotgun and bayonet. Handy).
Director Timur Bekmambetov has worked with vampires before, in his “Night Watch” and “Day Watch.” The vampires of those films were interesting: they were a nation of super-powered beings split into two opposing forces, the Light and the Dark, abiding by a truce that had maintained peace between both sides for centuries. The vampires of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” are much less interesting: they’re standard-fare vamps, invisible in mirrors and transforming into CGI-rendered grunters whenever bearing their sabertooth-like fangs. The only thing I found interesting about these creatures of the night (and day) was their resistance to silver. I was of the belief that werewolves were the only mythical beasts who objected to the presence of the precious metal. Apparently not.
As in most vampire movies, there is a head bloodsucker in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” He is Adam (Rufus Sewell, “Amazing Grace”), who is about as intimidating as any villain named Adam could possibly be. Adam is a plantation owner using black slaves as finger food and who is manipulating the American Civil War to his species’ advantage, filling the Southern forces with those of his own kind. Abraham has many violent run-ins with Adam and his cohorts, all shot with a slick visual flair by Bekmambetov and spoiled by dimly lit 3D. I slid down my 3D glasses a number of times during the film and discovered the image was much clearer and less murky without them, though of course more blurry. 2D seems to be the better format in this case.
Some may be of the opinion that the real Lincoln must be spinning in his grave as a result of this film. I disagree: I think Lincoln would be flattered by its claims that he was an action hero. He may not be so flattered by how the film short-changes him as a character, mind: we know very little about Walker’s Lincoln outside of his thirst for vengeance and his stubborn determination to wipe out the vampire species. Walker is capable under the man’s iconic top hat but, given that Lincoln is one of the most intriguing characters in American history, there should really be more to him. There is also a passionless love subplot shared between Abe and future wife Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, much prettier than the real Mary Todd), who as a character exists only to be threatened and placed in a position of danger.
Speaking of danger, there’s a notable lack of claw-biting suspense in the film’s many action sequences, chiefly because we all know how Abraham will meet his maker, and it ain’t in amongst a stampede of horses or underneath a runaway train. The axe-to-face action is perfectly well choreographed and captured with a very deliberate awesomeness by Bekmambetov, but I’d have liked to have been sitting on the edge of my theatre seat at some point, with the sense that anything could happen during the course of the film and that history could truly be rewritten on-screen. Disappointingly, that sense never came and consequently my arse became numb on several occasions. Unlike for Lincoln, there was no one sitting behind me with a gun, ready to pull the trigger, about to end it all.
“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” originates from a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, who serves as the film’s screenwriter (his other works includes the ingeniously titled “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”). I have not read his book, but I have heard from reliable sources that it tackles its preposterous premise not with its tongue in its cheek but with a straight face. This cinematic adaptation does the same, and I admire it for that: its makers could have very easily gone down the lazy route of farcical historical parody, but resisted. What I don’t admire is that it offers plenty of style but very little of anything else, the film truly enjoyable only during its brief spurts of “Matrix”-influenced bullet-time action. It’s a dramatically bloodless affair that - thanks to murky 3D - doesn’t even have the advantage of looking very good.
5/10
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