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Review of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

‘Lincoln’s anti-vampire mission will become a civil war for America’s soul’

Guardian News Service
Published: 00:00 June 25, 2012

Image Credit: AP
This film image released by 20th Century Fox shows Benjamin Walker portraying Abraham Lincoln, left, and Dominic Cooper portraying Henry Sturgis in a scene from "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." (AP Photo/20th Century Fox, Stephen Vaughan)

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Timur Bekmambetov's revisionist take on the 16th president brings the evisceration proclamation. We are all still hanging on for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as America's greatest president in Steven Spielberg's forthcoming Lincoln, waiting to see how he's going to do the walk, how he's going to play the transition from smooth-cheeked youth to granite-faced adult, and perhaps most of all what incredible voice he's going to come up with.

Yet I've a strong feeling that in all these things Day-Lewis and Spielberg might have been upstaged by this cheerfully subversive post-steampunk fantasy starring Benjamin Walker, directed by Timur Bekmambetov and adapted by Seth Grahame-Smith from his own graphic novel. It’s a joke which some will find in sacrilegious bad taste. For me, the self-aware craziness is the whole point.

This is about that side of Abraham Lincoln's life neglected by the historians: his passionate vocation as a vampire hunter. Lincoln's haggard look is now explained. His whole life, he was pulling a double shift. By day, a political idealist. By night, a slayer of the undead. And why? Revenge.

One of these murky red-eyed creatures, a hateful figure called Jack Barts (Marton Csokas) killed his mother, and now with the help of a mysterious figure called Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper) Abe has been trained in the samurai discipline of vampire hunting.

And it turns out the entirety of the American South, the confederacy itself, is a colossal parasitic conspiracy of vampires who have come to the land of America from a sinister place called Europe; they now feed off the blood of the slaves, and indeed the material resources of the United States. Lincoln's personal anti-vampire mission will become a civil war for America's soul.

The whole thing is so bizarre, it's tempting to imagine a franchise: Warren G Harding: Vampire Hunter, Jimmy Carter: Vampire Hunter, perhaps even a revisionist Richard M Nixon: Vampire Hunter. Lincoln's own Republican identity is not mentioned here.

When young Lincoln, serving behind the counter in a Capra-esque neighbourhood store, encounters an anti-abolitionist politician, he is contemptuous of the man’s supercilious and evasive remark that the slavery issue is “complicated”.

Tellingly, it is the chief vampire Adam (Rufus Sewell) who tries to reinforce this line of thinking with a sneering declaration that we are all slaves in one way or another, and that he has himself seen Africans sellother Africans into slavery.

It is extraordinary how often that fatuous and insidious line of argument is deployed in real life, incidentally and interesting to see it attributed to a vampire here. Finally, with the cares of state upon him, and his small son playing underneath his desk (a cheeky allusion to the famous Kennedy photograph) Lincoln must confront his destiny.

Bekmambetov directs with gusto, and the forthright absurdity of the story, combined with its weirdly heartfelt self-belief is winning. Unfortunately, it loses ground when it comes to the war itself. But only the very solemn could object to this bizarre adventure dreamt up for the 16th president.