There should be no need for me to give a plot outline for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or to explain what type of film it is. But then, we live in a world where Kim Kardashian is a millionaire, Rob Schneider has had a successful acting career and you’re not allowed to say “vagina” in Michigan, so clearly cerebrally-challenged people must be accounted for. So, to those people: Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter. But – and this is the crucial bit – not really. Because this film is a one-hour, 45 minute hiatus from reality, reason, logic, sense or – again, important – historical accuracy. Also, stop eating the paste.
Directed by Wanted’s Timur Bekmambetov, penned by Pride & Prejudice and Zombies’ Seth Grahame-Smith and produced by Johnny Depp’s Tim Burton, Vampire Hunter has all the on-paper credentials of a fantastically fun B-movie. Unfortunately, on screen, the film makes a fatal mistake: it decides, for reasons unknown to anyone, to try and take itself seriously. Did it not see its own title?
Flags Of Our Fathers actor Benjamin Walker stars in the titular role, and the wiry, brooding BFG intelligence he brings to the role is uncanny. But instead of being the ironic, wise-cracking Lincoln one would expect from a vampire-hunting romp, his President is a tragedy-stricken, emotionally-fraught man. The dark tones of his personal subplots are completely at odds with ludicrously OTT fight sequences aboard rickety, burning trains and vampire-trooped Battles of Gettysburg. The result is a film that provides neither emotional resonance nor shameless entertainment.
It’s not just the tone that’s too dark. In gimmicky 3D, the glasses mute the colours to an anaemically gothic pallor, and the already overly busy action sequences are rendered incomprehensible. Using the sound of swinging axes as liberally as JJ Abrams uses lens flare, Vampire Hunter becomes a constantly whirring white noise machine; if white noise sounded like camp, hissing vampires, the self-pleasuring screams of Dominic Cooper’s narcissistic pheromones and, of course, the deafening sound of mediocrity.