Much of the story takes place when Lincoln is a young man studying to be a lawyer while living in Springfield, Illinois. A far cry from John Ford’s vision of Honest Abe as a self-deprecating ruffian-statesman in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Benjamin Walker’s Lincoln is hellbent on exacting revenge for the death of his beloved mother (Robin McLeavy) at the fangs of Jack Barts (Marton Csokas), a vampire with whom he and his family tussled when he was 9 years old. Lincoln is trained by and works for Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), a mysterious man whose life’s pursuit is the eradication of vampires; he passes names of vampires along to Lincoln who then dispatches them with a silver-coated axe. Along the way he meets and marries Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), despite Henry’s warning that he not get involved with others lest they be put in danger. Abe also reconnects with Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie), a black childhood friend who was born free but is wanted for helping slaves escape the South.

The film’s villain is Adam (Rufus Sewell), a New Orleans-based plantation owner who oversees the South’s concentration of vampires, which runs the African slave trade because it provides a convenient source of food (a conceit that is either deeply offensive or just silly). Lincoln eventually determines that he would be more effective as a politician than a vampire killer, so he temporarily hangs up his axe and grows his iconic beard in order to become President. However, when the Civil War breaks out and Adam colludes with Confederate President Jefferson Davis (John Rothman) to use vampires in the Confederate army in order to ensure victory for the South, Lincoln must once again enter the fray, except this time on a much larger scale (let’s just say that Gettysburg plays a major role, as does all the silverware in Washington, D.C.).

Director Timur Bekmambetov was ostensibly hired on the basis of his creatively cartoonish action choreography in Wanted (2008) and his hugely popular Russian vampire films, Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), and he delivers exactly what you would expect. However, in adapting the story from page to screen, the central concept of Lincoln secretly battling vampires loses its fun precisely because the disjunction between style and content lacks humor and charm. Under Bekmambetov’s direction, the film is either flooded with the familiar stylistic traits of the modern hyperkinetic action spectacle, replete with plenty of bullet-time slow motion, extreme close-ups, and jarring edits, or else it is mired in overly serious dramatic scenes. He and veteran cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Passion of the Christ) deliver some memorable imagery (particularly of Lincoln backlit in the woods as he buries vampire corpses in the moonlight), and he draws generally good performances from his actors. And, while parts of the growing romance between Lincoln and Mary Todd are sweetly effective and play as a nice counterpoint to all the hacking and slashing, the film as a whole feels heavy and plodding and surprisingly humorless. Despite its visual cartoonishness (often the result of less-than-stunning CGI work), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is simply too serious to be fun and impossible to take seriously.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © 20th Century Fox