Offensive, stupid and unintentionally hilarious.

Rating: 3/10 (1 April 2013)

Hilariously, almost endearingly stupid, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter succeeds only as so bad it's funny cannon fodder. Pitched as a what if scenario, the film follows Lincoln through his early days, struggling with a need to avenge his family's death by the hands of a, you guessed it, vampire.
The book from which this is based on, of the same name, is wholly entertaining because it accepts the ridiculousness of the premise and plays in it, giving it a wink to the audience charm and wit. However, Wanted director Timur Bekmambekov, with a lesser cast and a lesser budget, fails to even acknowledge its own stupidity and instead opts to play it completely, seriously straight, making this a dull exercise in slow mo action and tedious cliché.
And so the film has to rely on the (limited) talents of its cast to pull the mess of a script together, and for the most part, they don't. Straddled with the Po faced role of the hero, Benjamin Walker fails even at being the Po faced hero, instead registering as a humourless, witless and idiotic impersonation of the great president, especially misfiring on the suitably misfiring romance between him and co star Mary Elizabeth Winstead, between this there is no chemistry, or in fact, sign of anything but air between them, which begs the question why bother with the love story and instead just make a 80 minute gore, slow mo and CGI fest of generic and repetitive action scenes of which the director is so, so fond of? Less poor, and by some miracle quite impressive, is Dominic Cooper, who, with the more extravagant role of 'Henry' the vampire hunter's trainer (as ridiculous as it sounds), stands out as the only actor in this who is both a) genuinely exerting some effort on his facial muscles and b) way too talented to be in an undercooked, overblown and offensively serious as this steaming, hot mess.
This is made all the more surprising when the screenwriter is the author, Seth Grahame Smith, who is evidently much more talented as a novelist than a screenwriter. The sheer lack of depth in the depicting of Lincoln is as disconcerting as it is awful; the only mildly interesting thing they seem to reveal about Honest Abe is his affinity to killing vampires. An attempt to add some humanity to him in the latter stages is as misjudged as the prosthetics they added to Walker's facial features, which looks to have cost around £3 from the local arts and crafts store. His dialogue, hindered by line upon line of clumsy exposition, has at least a slip shod, B-movie charm to it, with such pearls as 'I was out freeing slaves' or my personal favourite 'they say he's a madman'.
Verdict: In many ways, the acting in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by the lead and many of the supporting cast may well be a work of tongue in cheek ingenious; an, unbeknownst to the director, mutiny against the terrible script and tone of this, the worst film of 2012. Appealing only to fools and pre pubescent schoolboys.