Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Rating: Null/10 (10 April 2014)

Among Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter's problems - and they are legion - is not its inherently goofy hook: The 16th president spent his early years dispatching the undead fiends that had infiltrated the new republic, only to later find himself back at odds with Confederate undead during his famed Civil War administration. In a year that also brought filmgoers another serious, high-minded Lincoln film full of award-ready performances and lofty ideas, the notion of Abe slaying vampires is a perfectly fun and welcome basis for big, summer-blockbuster silliness.
However, screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith, producer Tim Burton, and most of all director Timur Bekmambetov take their Van Helsing version of Lincoln far too seriously, treating the vamp-dusting proceedings not like a cheesy, campy flick, but an essay prompt on a social studies exam. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter opens with a solemn quote from the Book of Genesis when it would have been better off taking a page from Roger Corman. Cleaved of a sense of tongue-in-cheek camp or humor, the film that follows is smothered in faux nobility as the Great Emancipator mows down bloodsuckers with grim determination.
Bekmambetov's never been a model of stylistic restraint. First with the spastic Russian fantasy-action epics Night Watch and Day Watch and then in Hollywood's Wanted, the director explored new ways of making his ADD-edited action films feel ponderous despite his trademark visual seizures and penchant for slo-mo, sped-up, slow-again action shots. That leaves Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a film full of restless kinetic energy but no juice. There is an intentional artifice to Bekmambetov's cinema that gives it a faded one-dimensionality, as if his films are grim lithographs. They are full of spraying blood, but no beating heart, with no room for humanity amid the arch monochromatic tableaux.
The director's much-ballyhooed fight visuals are impressive in small doses, and he can execute a dazzling batch of shots, but there is no grasp of scene, and the CGI-staged stunts have no emotional heft - they are just eye-popping tricks lacking a gut-punch. All is constant titillation with no giggling exploitation flavor - it is spectacle and sensation, epic chintz and chutzpah, none of it making much sense. Bekmambetov loves to pan over iconography, from stovepipe hats to the Washington Monument, but his characters feel as though they are also carved in the sides of granite tombs, frozen forever astride destiny but not really going anywhere. It is not the best approach for a film that must already carefully straddle and draw cinematic friction from two very different genres.
As Abe, Benjamin Walker keeps striving for charisma beneath the top hat, but is continually interrupted by training montages in which he leans to twirl his silver-edged ax. And Mary Elizabeth Winstead also does her best as a coquettish Mary Todd, but the moment she and Walker start to fan flames of courtship chemistry, Bekmambetov yanks Abe back to work at the frenzied, nonsensical vampire slaying. The cast is rounded out by Rufus Sewell easily tossing off snooty, aristocratic villainy without spilling his brandy. But as Abe's mysterious mentor in the vamp-combat arts, the very talented Dominic Cooper seems further doomed to play supporting characters in Hollywood fantasies. Anthony Mackie and Jimmi Simpson are also on hand as a couple of Lincoln's long-time compatriots.
As with so much Hollywood escapism these days, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter mistakes premise for plot - disjointed and scattershot, the film feels fuller of ideas than sense. About two-thirds of the way through, having run out of things to do, Abraham Lincoln gives up on having the Young Man with an Ax routine and rushes through Lincoln's political rise - the narrative economy no doubt encouraged by a disappointing lack of beheading during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Suddenly, the film arrives at the Civil War and Gettysburg where Bekmambetov plays at historical melodrama, slapping awkward faux glory on civil war scenes. There are also attempts throughout to blame the Southern slavery culture on vampires, which might be offensive if the filmmakers cared about what they were saying. Offensive or not, played the right way, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter could have been howling, eye-rolling fun. But Bekmambetov cannot figure out how to wink at his audience through the deadpan, and so the film feels so much duller than its catchy title promises.