Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

I’ve always had a problem with blaming good pieces of entertainment for the crap that it will undoubtedly spawn. For instance, the idea of resenting Jaws and Star Wars for all the bad summer movies that we’ve gotten over the years just doesn’t make sense to me. If something is successful—creatively or financially—the imitators will inevitably come out of the woodwork. One recent example of this is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which is deservedly seen as one of the best blockbuster movies in recent memory. However, there’s no mistaking it for a light-hearted romp, and as such studios have spent the last few years attempting to make their tent pole films as “dark” and “gritty” as possible; so much so that “dark” and “gritty” have become the most used words in entertainment-related press releases over the course of the last five years.

The unfortunate side effect of The Dark Knight is that fewer and fewer blockbuster movies have a genuine sense of “fun” to them. Films like The Avengers seem to have become the exception rather than the rule, though with the success of that one I suspect we may see a shift backward. It’s gotten to the point where even a monster film about the most beloved President in United States history and his secret life as a murderer of vampires has to be treated as seriously as possible. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has all the makings of a gloriously silly b-movie, but instead director Timur Bekmambetov decided to approach the material like it was a straight-faced Lincoln biopic with a handful of stylish, bloody interludes. What should be over-the-top, trashy fun instead becomes a mostly joyless drag.

The film begins as any fun time at the movies should: with a small African-American child getting whipped repeatedly. This child turns out to be William Johnson, who will grow up to be played by Anthony Mackie. He is a good friend of Abraham Lincoln, a small child whose mother is killed by a villainous plantation owner (Marton Csokas) who happens to be a vampire. Several years later, a grown-up Abe (Benjamin Walker) seeks revenge for his mother’s death. When the initial attempt doesn’t go as planned, a mysterious man named Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper) offers to train Abe in the ways of vampire hunting. Abe and Henry then set their sights on Adam (Rufus Sewell), the pseudo-President of Vampires who lives in New Orleans. Abe eventually gets into politics—and, duh, wins the Presidency—but just because he thinks he’s done with vampires doesn’t mean vampires are done with him.

This entire enterprise is the child of Seth Grahame-Smith, who came into prominence with his mash-up novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies back in 2009. After writing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in 2010, he jumped head-first into film and television with the MTV series The Hard Times of RJ Berger and the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. He was able to write the screenplay for the film version of Abraham Lincoln, and that actually might be the most interesting aspect of it. It’s kind of fun to see how Grahame-Smith’s story aligns with actual history, even if a lot of it is utter crap. (Of course, the whole premise of this thing is that Abe Lincoln was big on slaughtering vampires, so I might give most of its historical inaccuracies a pass.) There are a select few moments of humor to be found in the finished film, and most of it likely comes from Grahame-Smith more than director Bekmambetov. If that guy got his way, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter wouldn’t be more than a slow-motion funeral dirge.

In general, Bekmambetov shows little interest in the written word, dialogue or story. All his attention went in to making the fight scenes as bloody and painfully “cool” as possible. The results are mixed, but even what a sequence is effective its impact is immediately undone by the choppiness of the rest of the film. Characters come and go at random, it’s not always easy to see what is happening, and everyone’s motivations are frequently unclear. You can make a certain shot or moment look like the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s not going to matter if I’m not invested in how it turns out. It doesn’t help that this film also has some actual history to deal with, and we all know that (SPOILER ALERT) Lincoln goes on to win the Civil War. As bad as much of the film is, it is laughably so whenever it goes into “social studies textbook” mode. When the final scene of your Abraham Lincoln movie involves Mary Todd Lincoln (played quite well by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) telling her husband they’re going to be late for the theater, subtlety probably isn’t your strong suit.

All of the flaws in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter wouldn’t necessarily have been solved with a major tonal shift, but it certainly could have helped. After breaking through with Wanted in 2008, Bekmambetov has churned out progressively less interesting projects as producer and his return to the director’s chair doesn’t necessarily indicate that he has a lot of range. He is skilled at upping the “slick” factor as high as possible, but that only works if a) you have material that is compatible with such a style, and/or b) it makes the project more fun rather than more depressing. I’m still not entirely sure if Bekmambetov was going for here, but I do know that it just doesn’t work.

Grade: C-