Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Until Seth Grahame-Smith wrote his extremely revisionist historical novel, I’ll go out on a limb and say no one thought of Abe Lincoln as an action hero. The gangly, homely president never exuded much physical prowess as far as history books go, yet he wields an axe quite convincingly in director Timur Bekmambetov’s ridiculous and fun Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Benjamin Walker – the doppelganger of a young Liam Neeson (who, coincidentally, was originally attached to play Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming biopic on the president) – plays the great emancipator, who, as the story goes, pursues a law degree, woos Mary Todd, leads the country during the Civil War, and, you know, leads a secret life hunting vampires. In order to exact revenge against the vampire who killed his mother, Lincoln learns the tricks to the vampire hunting trade by Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), who then passes along names of the damned in Springfield, Illinois for him to destroy.

This trail leads to the head underworld honcho himself – no, not Dracula, thankfully – but a Lestat-type Southern plantation owner named Adam (Rufus Sewell), who has co-opted the peculiar institution into his own feeding ground to sustain all of his minions. It all comes to a bloody head when the abolitionist movement leads to war, pitting Lincoln against not just the South, but also against the undead. And therein lies the grand metaphor that will surely ruffle some feathers since Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is less about equating slave owners to mythical blood-thirsty beasts so much as painting the entire South as a bastion of pure evil, with only the great Abe Lincoln leading the righteous North against it. Life is rarely that black and white, but, c’mon: who needs reality when we have the Lincolnator destroying vampires, in all its visceral glory, with a silver-edged axe in speed-ramped slo-mo? Be sure to check reality at the door with this one even if Grahame-Smith peppers the film with actual events and characters, like real-life Lincoln political foe Stephen Douglas, Underground Railroad icon Harriet Tubman, the battle of Gettysburg as a momentous turning point in the war, and, most notably, Lincoln battling vampires on a runaway train going over a burning bridge.

One way that Abe Lincoln: Vamp Hunter makes all of this work is that it takes itself just seriously enough to make us invested in the characters – including solid supporting roles in store owner Joshua Speed (Jimmi Simpson) and Lincoln’s childhood friend, Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie) – but not so much so that we can’t believe it when Lincoln chases a vampire through a horse stampede, in what is one of the most absurd action sequences to hit the big screen this year. Looking more like a videogame than a movie, at one point Lincoln literally gets hit by a horse that is flung at him by the vampire; yet, instead of having all of his bones crushed, Lincoln rides the horse to destroy the vampire once and for all. Consider it the 1860s version of an impossible car chase. And surprisingly, in a world where the president of the United States battles vampires with a goddamned battleaxe, it works.

Speaking of vampires, let’s examine those for a minute. Since this is the post-Twilight world, I’m desperately sad to say Grahame-Smith has caved into the now common trope that vampires survive just fine in the daylight. I figured that was one of the most defining – if not, the defining – characteristic of the vampire outside of the fangs and having a bad case of death after getting stabbed in the heart, but apparently not. To be fair, though, most of the vampire hunting action takes place at night even though the sun has zero affect on them. And they don’t fucking shimmer or have much interest in eternal love. Otherwise they have some more traditional traits: they can disappear completely (an update on super-speed), they have xenomorph-esque dripping wet mouths when fully vamped out (because just having long incisors isn’t nearly scary enough), and they’re physically unable to destroy each other (makes sense). As for their weaknesses, they’re extremely sensitive to silver. This seems decidedly more werewolfian than vampiric, but it isn’t totally outside the realm of the myth. So while these aren’t Stephenie Meyer’s pussified non-vampires, it’s a tad disappointing that not a single vampire (spoiler alert) is destroyed by the classic wooden stake-through-the-heart or warded off by garlic or a crucifix. Apparently Grahame-Smith was revisionist in more ways than one.

All that said, one only really notices all this upon reflection since Bekmambetov keeps the action moving quickly, with enough twists and turns to keep the plot from being merely those necessary interludes in between Lincoln kicking major vampire ass. While the likelihood of seeing the further adventures of Lincoln versus vampires suffers due to the sad reality of the events at the Ford’s Theatre, it wouldn’t surprise me if Grahame-Smith came up with some clever twist to keep things going. There’s plenty of history to revisit during the Reconstruction, after all. And we’re all living in a post-modern world, these days, where facts are what you make anyway, so why not make a franchise out of it? I know I’d go see it.