Lacking charm, charisma, excitement, or entertainment.

Rating: 2/10 (18 December 2012)

Lincoln begins with a suitable arousal, instantly fading into a gruesome and horrific melee between Confederate and Union troops. I watched with genuine disgust as soldiers trampled upon one another in a muddy marsh, punching, stabbing, kicking, crushing,crying and screaming. These brief 30 seconds are perhaps the most enthralling of the entire film. What could have been a sweeping historical epic becomes a tedious drama about the "13th Amendment". The first act - easily 40 minutes or so - revolves entirely around the attempt to pass this amendment which would abolish slavery or some such thing, and scene after scene after scene includes dreary office backdrops in which Lincoln and his subordinates discuss the "vote" and "votes" and the "13th Amendment" and the fact that they need more "votes" and that they don't have enough votes, and so on and so forth. There is literally no narrative value in repeating the same topic a dozen different ways for an hour - the audience got the idea in the first 10 minutes. As the story progresses we're introduced to new buzzwords like "slavery" which are in turn swapped for "The 13th Amendment" during the second act, and move onto larger indoor settings like courtrooms and conference rooms. To make things even more boring there are plenty of Lincoln monologues thrown in that you won't make any sense of and that don't relate to the story in any way. Just when you think the film is about to pick up and inject some excitement into the dull drama with the invasion of a place called "Willimton" (something like that), the director instead opts to indulge the audience with - incredibly - an underwhelming dialogue between Lincoln and his subordinates discussing the battle, instead of showing us the gritty civil war in its most naked and entertaining form. You won't really make sense of what happens between key scenes as the 17th century dialogue is difficult to follow and the drama so confusing that you'll tune out and wait for the next arousal scene to clue you in. And that's that. Two hours of boring speeches. A waste of money and effort - the only reason it has gathered praise from the critics is because it fills scenes with dialogue instead of thrills. Intentionally designed to appeal to the critics and not the audience.