Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter nets bonus points right at the start for the sheer perversity of its premise. Who would have thought that our greatest President moonlighted as a vampire killer? Or on second thought, maybe he was a vampire killer sunlighting as the President.
It doesn’t really matter which, since there’s no real connection between Lincoln as a historical figure and vampire hunting in particular. It may as well have been called John Adams Professional Dogcatcher. The very idea of Lincoln as a destroyer of an entire race, vampire or otherwise, seems unlikely to begin with. But the movie doesn’t trouble itself with that discrepancy, or much of anything.
It’s a shame, because the movie has the potential and the talent behind it to be a deadpan masterpiece. It has the production values that might be associated with an honest epic Civil War movie, and the cinematography by Caleb Deschanel is gorgeous. I’m not familiar with much of the work of author/screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith, though I did enjoy the cheeky update of Dark Shadows he wrote for Tim Burton (who’s a producer here). The director is Timur Bekmambetov, who made the brilliant satirical action flick Wanted.
But it just doesn’t come together, mainly because the plot is slapdash and uninvolving. After young Lincoln sees his mother murdered by a vampire, he vows revenge. The grownup Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) meets Henry (Dominic Cooper), a vampire hunter who trains him as a bounty killer. Along the way, he meets Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), gets into politics, you know the drill.
Given that Grahame-Smith’s first novel was called “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” it’s no surprise that the factbased Lincoln story and the vampire stuff don’t quite fit together. I don’t believe they’re meant to. Like the similar The Raven, in which Edgar Allan Poe was awkwardly shoehorned into a police procedural, Vampire Hunter takes an intriguing historical figure and places him into a story that is much less interesting.
The very image of the towering Honest Abe, stovepipe hat and all, brandishing a silver axe and plunging it into bloodsuckers’ skulls is enough for a few laughs, but the movie refuses to follow the absurdity curve all the way to the end. The tone of the film is deliberately somber, and the filmmakers take pains to keep the movie’s tongue out of cheek. This is an interesting approach, but they don’t follow through and make the story worth following. The vampire hunting is occasionally interesting, and the serious Lincoln stuff is perfunctory and dull.
Grahame-Smith makes a cursory effort to tie the vampire plot to historical details, like having the vampires fight exclusively for the South. With a bit more work this could have made for an interesting view of the Civil War, though it once again feels like an inappropriate metaphor: the proverbial bloodsucker sounds more like a southerner’s view of the Union than the other way around. The Underground Railroad and the Battle of Gettysburg make cameo appearances.
Benjamin Walker is so good as Lincoln that I wouldn’t mind seeing him in a serious Lincoln movie. He’s gargantuan and imposing, but with a solemn face and soft demeanor, and he always seems to be caught in between the need to fight and the urge to think things through first. Walker gives a performance that is much more complex than the movie deserves.
Cooper and Winstead are barely there, as is Anthony Mackie as a freeman childhood friend of Lincoln’s. Jimmi Simpson is allowed to have some fun as Lincoln’s boss-turned-advisor. The movie brightens whenever Alan Tudyk turns up as a particularly boneheaded, foppish Stephen Douglas, though the Douglas estate may quarrel with his portrayal.
Because Bekmambetov is a good director of action films, some of the action sequences are entertaining. There’s a chase sequence amid a stampede of horses that’s inventive and exciting, and the climactic train scene is done well. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is an average action film at best, and at worst a huge waste of a pretty good President.
** out of ****
NOTE: The movie misses a huge opportunity by ending with Abe and Mary Todd just about to head off to Ford’s Theater. Certainly the Abe Lincoln who can fight vampires would be able to dispense with John Wilkes Booth swiftly.
