ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER (Timur Bekmambetov). 105 minutes. Opens Friday (June 22). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
Is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter a great bad movie or a bad great movie?
By the time a vampire picks up a horse and throws it at the future president, the question is irrelevant. It’s its own wild-ass thing, a spectacular mutant beast the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
In case you missed my point, let me reiterate it: this is a movie where a vampire picks up a fucking horse and throws it at Abraham Lincoln, who not only somehow survives the impact but winds up riding the thing through a stampede. And that’s just the first beat of one of two incredible action set pieces in which director Timur Bekmambetov – who gave us the Night Watch movies and Wanted – mashes the conceptual gas pedal to the floor and simply dazzles us with the kinetic imagery he’s pulling out of his pulsing brain.
The bones of the movie are ridiculous, a stiff, clumsy retelling of salient points in the real Lincoln’s career reflected through screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s gonzo notion that Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) balanced his storied life as a shop clerk, lawyer and politician with nightly acts of vampire slaying, coached by one of the good bloodsuckers (Dominic Cooper).
As the Great Impaler, Walker gives a performance that could best be described as animatronic. He’s good at the physical stuff, but so trapped under makeup that he might as well be a rejected mannequin from Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents.
But you’re not going to this for the acting. You’re going for a movie where Lincoln kills a whole bunch of vampires – who secretly control the Southern states, which was the real reason for the Civil War. You want a movie that’s as batshit crazy as the title promises.
And you get one.