A cut above the rest!

Rating: 7/10 (16 October 2012)

I was introduced to Honest Abe's secret vampire-slaying days by a stoned Chipotle employee who claimed he was savvy to "this great history book about a truth that has been hidden from the public", etc. When I got home to figure out what lunatic revisionist nonsense actually made this guy open a book, I realized the poor sod got fooled by a novel - which, of course, made it all the more hilarious. Weeks later, the trailer to the film adaptation came out. True story!
The main question you should be asking yourselves here is: does the movie work? Because with a title like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter", how much can you possibly be hoping for?
What you should be hoping for above all is a good time, and Bekmambetov delivers like a pro. The title pretty much tells you the entire story of the movie, so I am not gonna waste time pointlessly discussing secondaries like plot and characters. Suffice it to say that it was well (enough) acted, and apart from a few tedious minutes of dialogue in the later portion, the pacing and plot took you down their merry course with nary a hiccup. As a matter of fact, it seemed like everyone on the production crew did a top-rate job.
The action certainly deserves a mention, since it's the driving force behind this movie. Abe was "good at splittin' rails" back in the day (and not too great at shooting), so his vampire-slaying weapon of choice is an axe. He is taught to wield it in a Tedious Temple Training montage that's part hokey 19th century Americana and part Herculean feats of CGI Axe Fu. From that point on, the action sequences are as brutal and fast-paced as any R-rated big-budget production, yet still refreshing and original enough to clench your fists and put a satisfied grimace on your face. And as with pretty much every post-millennial big budget action movie, the CGI always elevates everything a notch or two towards the precarious heights of absurdity - which usually harms a film, but we're talking Abe Lincoln here, so no reason not to throw in stuff like a Matrix-style chase on top of stampeding horses!
It's this conversion of Americana into absurdity - first by a mashup novelist, then by a Russian-Kazakh director for whom the breadth of American pop-lore is just an amusing artifact to dissect and incorporate into his visual palette - that really made the movie work for me. The aforementioned horse stampede scene (sans vampires and Lincoln) could have easily come out of any Marlboro Man commercial, back when they were still allowed to make those for TV. Nothing is ever really taken seriously here, except the quality of the finished product. And in this crew's hands, that makes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter way more entertaining than most recent mainstream vampire flicks, and - let's be honest with ourselves here - most of the big modern big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, which are usually some sort of comic book adaptation or another, since none of the greedy Hollywood rats can grow a pair big enough to take a chance and sink money into anything that isn't an already-established franchise in one or more media formats.
So if the title sounds like something you'd be into, you should definitely check this out. This definitely gets my "feel-good movie of the year" vote.