Not since the Scooby Doo Murder Mysteries has a production had the audacity to take such an important icon of American history and bastardize him to “karate chop action figure” levels, but as vampire love stories have been nauseatingly overdone and True Blood stole the “what if vampires were one of us” angle, I guess the next safest approach would be to torment the world with a concept like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. That’s right, Abraham-freer of the slaves, “Four Score and Seven Years ago,” stovepipe hat wearin’, died in a theatre-Lincoln…Vampire Hunter.
In one fell swoop I’ve given you the plot, the setting, the
main character, and I’ve even spoiled the ending for you, but fuck it…you’ll
probably see it anyway because anything with a distinguished gentleman opening
a can of whoop-ass is just an awesome concept (see Morgan Freeman, Michael
Caine, etc.). I can beg you to just watch Blade
because it will always be the high-octane, high-action, perfectly overdone
poster child for what any movie against vampires should be…but it’s not Abraham
Lincoln…is it?
Telling the Encyclopedia Britannica to go fuck itself, AL,VH starts us off in Indiana where an
altercation between Abraham, a young African American boy and his abusive
overseer leads to Abraham’s father getting fired from his job on the plantation
and the plantation owner deciding to take it out on Abe’s mom, Nancy. Nearly a
decade later, Abraham tries to get revenge for his mother’s death and attempts
to kill the plantation owner who, he shockingly finds out, is a vampire!
Conveniently rescued by Henry “Expositions ‘R Us” Sturgess, Abraham Lincoln
learns about the existence of vampires and trains to be a vampire hunter and
goes on missions to kill vampires and never once has his life pro-actively
threatened by vampires and at some point decides to become President of the
United States which affects absolutely nothing except accuracy. Ha. Ha.
…Ha.
If it wasn’t clear…I struggled with this one. I was willing
to give the idea the benefit of the doubt but when I looked at this piece by
piece, there was no reason that this had to be about Abraham Lincoln except to
cater to that “distinguished gentleman opening a can of whoop-ass” crowd I
mentioned earlier. In its poor attempts to squeeze some actual American History
into this movie, AL, VH just decided
that it would scrap all the scenes that would have let this story flow together
and chopped out (see what I did there? ‘Cause…he uses an axe?) everything that
wasn’t some iconic moment of Lincoln’s real-person life or a video montage or
some kinda cool…sorta…action scene. And that action wasn’t all that amazing.
Just done in amazingly slow motion.
If we weren’t watching Abraham taking down some random
pointless vampire with a new super move like a new level of Abraham Lincoln vs. the World, we were
forced to watch some thespian understudy performance of the great speeches of
Lincoln’s time like the Gettysburg Address or “so I’m the biggest threat to
your existence and you’re really just going to let me go, huh?” Be it action or
drama, if it wasn’t overdone, it was half-assed and stale; nothing was fun
about having Abe Lincoln as a vampire hunter other than he was one and even
then it was hard to get comfortable. There were too many times where I couldn’t
tell if this movie was trying to be serious about the “history” it was trying
to tell or if it was aiming for comedic satire as if to blatantly point out
“this is how dumb we look…but you’re still here.”
I can’t give any kudos to this movie for spouting out
something that was ultimately crap but kept me interested because it catered to
the insensitive nerd in me. Like web
comics that point out how cool it would be to have Barack Obama as a chocolatey
breakfast cereal, or give Hello Kitty a rocket launcher and send her after the
Kardashians, I feel almost dirty for not being impressed here; like I’m
violating some sacred code. We asked for this. It’s our own fuckin’ fault.
I can’t tell if I’m giving Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter too high of a score because I was
too captivated by the “sparklies of iconic presidential vampire slaying” to be
able to really reflect on all of the outlandish nonsense that was furiously
splooged onto the screen or if I’m giving it too low of a score because I’m
disturbed and slightly offended at everything that allowed this idea to see the
light of day in the first place.
This is no Blade.
It seems like a vampire movie is either trying to be that or Twilight and AL,VH just fails to be anything except original. Wildly fucking
original. Like the pet rock was original. Probably would have made a better
movie. Pet Rock, Vampire Hunter. Fuck
yeah. I bet that would be awesome! Well higher than the 6 dustbusters I’m
giving this Abraham Lincoln nonsense. Sigh, next you’re going to tell me
they’re making a movie about Pride and
Prejudice...and zombies.
Oh. Well…shit.
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