Movie review: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
U/A; Horror-action
Dir: Timur Bekmambetov
Cast: Benjamin Walker

In a world where every single moviegoer complains about how 3D makes movies look dim and obscure, director Timur Bekmambetov and his producers at Fox dole out a movie set almost entirely in the dark.

Perhaps this was a deliberate ploy to hide the lack of good content that writer Seth Grahame-Smith (Dark Shadows) churned out.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a crushing disappointment, not just because it doesn’t live up to its crazy title, but also because it presents an opportunity for the talented Wanted and Night Watch director Bekmambetov to make a genuinely bad movie, in agonizing 3D.

This is all the more frustrating seeing as the film contains the three most entertaining genres of them all – horror, action and alternate history – the filmmakers lay waste to all three and deliver a story that sucks as much as the vampires in the movie do.

We’re thrust in the 1880’s parallel universe, where a young Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) sees his mom get murdered by a vampire and pledges revenge against the monstrous species.

To do this, he trains himself with his pal Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper) to hack and slash vampires to bits and rid the world of the pesky rodents.

Pretty soon we’re treated with piranha-like vampires leaping at us and Lincoln’s axe and blood flying around 3D style.
The whole thing would’ve been a superb entertainer had it been a full-on campy Grindhousey comedy with Samuel Jackson as a black Lincoln or Martin Luther King.

The special effects are straight out of a video game cutscene, and they distract more than they wow.

The upside is that Benjamin Walker (Meryl Streep’s son in law) looks like Liam Neeson and is a good actor - one hopes to see him in better films in the future.u00a0

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