A good movie, but really drawn out and bland

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2013)

Let's just say, "Lincoln" did a good job at conveying a PART of his life, but for the majority of the movie, it revolved around the 13th amendment's ratification and at that point should have just been called "The 13th" or something. It did very little to revolve on his history and how he came to be in present position, instead it just throws you into the fray, and just establishes him just being "there" in the aftermath of the battle.
Another weak point of the movie is the dialog and the build up, its a very dialog heavy movie, so if you can't stand listening to people talk, this is definitely not a Lincoln movie for you. It's not in general the people talking that is unengaging, but how it's executed and portrayed, there's no sense of you, the viewer, captivated what people are talking about, or feel that tension and stress that Lincoln had to go through to get the amendment ratified, if you want to boil it down to simple terms "it's an old man debating with a bunch of old men with another bunch of old men in a building", and this is by no means no disrespect to Lincoln himself, but how it was portrayed was really, really slow and boring, and only to conclude on a ending where you don't even see a scene of Lincoln's assassination and is directly mentioned by "The president has been shot." That's it. If the point was to evoke a strong emotion while being indirect about it, it really backfired, just didn't work here. All in all, it's not a bad movie in what its trying to convey, the actors do a good job, but if you came here for a life story of Abraham Lincoln, you should probably look into documentaries, because the dialog would probably be more engaging there than here.