Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Rated R

Run time 1 hour 45 minutes

Starring: Benjamin Walker and Dominic Cooper

This movie is based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. The screenplay was written by Seth Grahame-Smith. Apparently when Grahame-Smith was hired to write the screenplay based on his own novel, he became confused and thought he was supposed to write a different movie with the same title.

The title and the names of the main characters are about all the movie has in common with the book. I know, I know this is supposed to be a review of the movie itself not a bitch session comparing it to the novel. But come on, I would expect something like this if a different person had written the screenplay not the same dude that wrote the story in the first place. Again, maybe he was confused, or drunk, or turned into a vampire and decided to write a different version. Whatever, now I guess it’s time to go on to the movie review.

This film was made using, what appears to be, sepia style tones. This was kind of artsy and didn’t really do much for the movie. I’m sure there was a pretty significant reason for doing this, but it totally escaped me. There is a lot of slow motion action and I mean slow motion, almost as if someone kept hitting the pause button every time an action sequence happened. It made it easier to see all of the black blood spilled with every swing of Abe’s mighty silver tipped axe, and there is a lot of it during the course of the movie.

Somewhere in between slow motion action scenes, they tried to add some background and substance. I usually like movies like this and I had high hopes for this one. I was sadly disappointed.  It was okay, but just okay.

Bottom line is this, if you haven’t read the book, you may enjoy the movie as long as you don’t go in with real high expectations. If, like me, you read the book and liked it, avoid this movie because the stories don’t have anything in common except for Abe and vampires. If you read the book and didn’t like it, why would I even be talking to you about a movie you obviously have no intention of seeing?