Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter

I already know what you're going to say. How were you surprised that this move was ridiculous? You saw the trailer right? Look at the name of the movie! Yes, yes I know, but there have been plenty of trailers that look terrible but end up being masterful works of art. Shaun of the Dead looked like Benny Hill reincarnated, but the end result was a cool and funny zombie movie that was even a little moving at times. Have you seen the trailer for The Last Dragon by Berry Gordy? "Catches bullets with his teeth?? ___please!!!" This movie starred Prince's ex groupie Vanity and a black kung fu master from the hood versus a Bubba Smith (Police Academy) look alike with a jeri curl. This later inspired the move The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise. Saki!!!!!! Anyway, Last Dragon is about as fresh as it gets for 80's movies! So some movie ideas sound great in theory and actually end up being great in practice. However, there are some that sound good in theory but when you try and follow through with it you get a disaster. For instance, my buddy's  idea for Iron Smeagol. A dual sequel to Iron Eagle and Lord of the Rings where Gollum teams up with Chappy to fight Bin Laden and his evil posse to recapture precious! While I was in tears when I heard this idea, there's no way this movie could keep my attention for 90 minutes. And well, the same happens here with Abe the vampire hunter.

This movie was adapted from the novel and put to screen by Timothy Burton and the director Timur Bekmambetov. He is responsible for Wanted and Night Watch. Wanted was one of the most ridiculous stories ever put on screen but also had some of the coolest action scenes ever put to film. People's lives are determined by the loom of fate? Really??? Night Watch was an incomprehensible mess but again had some pretty dark and imaginative scenes with vampires. So Timur has a history of working with terrible stories that he at least makes watchable with cool imagery. I was just hoping that with Burton's influence would at least help the story a bit but boy was I wrong.The story is simple enough. Abe watches his mom get murdered by a vampire and then spends the rest of his childhood building up the courage to kill the man who murdered his mom. He then teams up with Sturgess(Dominic Cooper) who trains him on how to kill vampires. He trains and trains, complete with a montage, and has a few practice killings before he gets his revenge. But once he finally gets to Jack Barts, his mother's killer, Bart's boss Adam finds out and decides he must either get Abe to join him or kill him. On the surface it doesnt sound THAT bad but again it's Abraham Lincoln. He's running for president, courting Mary Todd, working in a trade store, studying law, freeing slaves, and killing vampires? Well the sad thing is, that's not what bothered me about the movie.

***spoiler alert***

Well it kind of does but mainly the movie is just boring. When Abe is killing Barts who is played by Marton Csokas, he does so in this random stampede of a thousand angry horses while effortlessly jumping from horse to horse to do so. So carrying an ax gives you superpowers? The action looks like video game footage from the 90's at best. If I wanted to watch Quake 3 Arena or Sonic the Hedgehog replayed, I'd have my nerd friends set up a LAN party reunion. If you dont know what these are, consider yourself lucky. Not all of the action is this cheesy, just the two longest ones. The final train battle looks like Rush Hour 2 where Abe and his slave buddy toss the ax back and forth to each other in some form of homo erotic bonding to help defeat the main bad guy. And for some reason midway through the movie they switch to Abe at 50 and go off on this pointless tangent for what seems like an hour about the Civil War. 

The only bright spots were a few cool action shots, and Timur pulling a George Lucas. Instead of Lucas making all of the Dark Side nazis, he made all of the evil vampires slave owners. They ate the slaves for their meals. And everytime I saw Csokas (XXX) on screen I kept waiting for him to yell "Bitches come!!" The only thing that might have this movie fresh is if they had Abe assasinated by a vampire at the end and then switched to modern day Washington D.C. And the next thing you see is "Obama" getting off of Air Force One with an Ipod made of silver covered in vampire blood as it was playing Bow Down by Westside Connection. This movie was really WEAK!