Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Like so many of these very silly ideas, this was a fun concept and had some big laughs towards the beginning, but then had to actually string it out into a full feature with a satisfying ending and actually got rather dull towards the end.

The title is brilliant, and it’s certainly what it says on the tin. After kicking off in very obviously comic book style, dispensing with details like his sister and his step-mother, we see Lincoln seeking revenge for his mother’s death with a pistol. The firearm goes wrong, but eventually the young Lincoln manages to make it go off and bewilderingly the pellet both lodges in the other man’s eye and kills him – maybe it ricocheted back from the back of his skull! Such things do not need to be overthought.

The man of course comes back to life and Lincoln is saved only by another man – a man who hunts vampires. Lincoln learns his craft, starting from an incredibly comic book scene where he channels his anger through his axe-blows, and soon the future president is a supernaturally gifted vampire hunter.

Balancing living an anonymous life hunting the dead in the southern States with the beginnings of a political career, Lincoln also finds love. However, when he finally takes out the vampire he wanted revenge upon, he provokes the ire of the head vampire, and things must inevitably come to a head – against the background of the confederates taking up arms and the American Civil War beginning.

Don’t look here for a politically correct film. It’s not. It won’t pass feminist tests about whether women speak to one another. It’s horribly insensitive about race, with the slaves literally treated as food, plenty of tokenism and – even if spoken by the antagonist – lines equating slavery of human beings to other, more trivial forms of slavery that nobody argues against. It’s certainly disrespectful to the dead, who after all died less than two hundred years ago, especially when it came to portraying those fighting for the South as being allied with bloodsucking vampires. But it’s all a ridiculous film about Lincoln hunting vampires with an axe, so who cares?

The problem is that it doesn’t fully embrace its daftness. This needed to go into camp excess, to be a 300 or a Sin City. It needed absurd amounts of style and silliness. Instead, it plays it as a straight comic book horror film, and so by the time there’s a big confrontation on a train, it’s much too serious – and even the amusing way it makes a fork an image of great importance can’t save it from getting dull enough I almost nodded off.

Strong performances from Benjamin Walker, the ubiquitous Dominic Cooper (here doing a simple, cool performance, which suits him best) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead – the girl from Scott Pilgrim – help carry things along, but ultimately it needed a stronger script and more style. Or at least even more silliness. Because the last thing I expected this to be was dull.

The second misfire with Tim Burton’s name attached (even if not as director) in the last couple of months. Still, it’s piqued my interest for Spielberg’s Lincoln.