Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

This entry should have been dedicated to "Chronicle", another movie chosen on the "under 90 minutes" criteria considering my current time limits. The reason to "pollute" my blog with "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" :) is that I'm not really in the mood to talk about "Chronicle". The reasons are many, starting from the lack of time for a detailed enough entry up to my deranged subconscious which by some weird connections made the story in that movie hard to watch, so what about writing more on it afterwards ? Therefore I'll leave "Chronicle" for another time and I'll turn to probably the weirdest title this year fortunately seen not that long ago, and still fresh in my mind.

Given the combination of terms in the movie subject, I started (like probably many others) with the premise of some stupid action getting into a dumb unwanted comedy at some points and ending up as superficial as "Wanted" .. another production of the same director (Timur Bekmambetov). I suppose that if you don't know anything about the movie, or even better .. if you know only half the title and you enter the cinema having a shock when you find out the other half, you might end up building exactly the impression described above about it. Ironically, I guess the movie is saved exactly by the fact that you cannot take seriously the subject before it starts knowing already the main idea. And the way the story unveils is like slapping you in the first phase exactly for this, in the sense .. ok ... wait a minute ... this doesn't look that dumb as I thought it would be ... More exactly, we have him, Abraham Lincoln, as a child losing his mother after a first encounter with a human blood sucker. The little Abe, not realizing yet who he's up against, builds a vengeance inner desire until he grows older enough to be able to confront the murderer. Surprise though .. the guy doesn't want to die from a normal bullet. Well .. further we have much more of the story to come :) I will only say that as I was suggesting above the movie will most likely seem less dumb than you were expecting, exactly due to the way the action builds in the first part. Actually, in the first half or even a bit more you could replace the name of the main character with any other. The role of "American President" enters the scene quite late and it's introduced completely separated from the story involving the long teeth specimens. Yes, the end mixes them up with the American Civil war and the personal life of the guy on the 5 dollar bill ... but this comes already at a moment in time when you might be able to accept also such nonsense as a story :) exactly due to the way it was built up to that point.

If the movie would have placed the same story in a hypothetical context (e.g.,: John Smith: Vampire Hunter where John Smith = obscure governor, senator, sheriff or I don't know what else), probably it would have greatly reduced the critics targeting the "attack" on the real history :). On the other hand the movie is based on a novel (who's author is also the screenwriter) that probably sold exactly due to the name on the cover :) And which after all (being a novel :p) has a story of more than five lines that mixes enough adventure, action, romance that depending on the mood to give good chances to be entertaining ;)

Rating:
3 out of 5 - totally objective
4 out of 5 - if you feel up to tolerate a "hardcore SF history hacking" without thinking too much about the real version .. + the 3D is nice here ;) even for me