Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

You know, I'm tired of this. I really am.

I'm so sick and tired of watching all these mediocre, unmemorable movies that are so insanely hard to talk about. Why are they hard to talk about? Well, what are you supposed to say about something that is completely and unashamedly bland? Well, besides the fact that it is completely and unashamedly bland, I mean.

The "Mona Lisa" I could talk about. "Guernica" I could talk about. Even Andy Warhol's freaking soup can could warrant discussion. What the hell am I supposed to say about a 2x4 someone dunked in beige paint? That's not even artsy in the most snooty, elitist fashion, although get enough moscato in a Fine Arts major and I'm sure they'll do their damnedest to try.

But that's what "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is. It's a 2x4 dunked in beige paint. There wasn't even a brush involved to import some form of base artistry. There was only dunking. In and out, let dry, print a couple thousand copies, send to the theaters, next on the list.

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is for me, a perfect example of a movie with no soul. There is no passion behind any of it. It's just an overly flashy checklist of action movie beats which plays out more like watching a collection of videogame cutscenes. Cutscenes with really bad CGI. The kind of cutscenes you would skip upon playing the game a second time. And the worst thing about it is that even though it goes down the list of action movie beats like clockwork, at the same time it's absurdly boring.

THRILL AS HE TWIRLS HIS AXE!!! (Seriously, thrill at it. "Axe-twirling" makes up 58% of this film.)

I think the reason it's boring is because it never gets beyond the gimmick of "Wouldn't it be silly to see Abraham Lincoln fighting the undead?" I can appreciate the concept to a point, I suppose. It's taking something that normally isn't badass and making it badass because something that isn't badass becoming badass equals a form of "awesome," as decreed by Teh Intarnets. And while there may be something to that, it's really not enough to fuel an entire movie. At least if it's actually suicidal enough to take itself seriously, which this film unfortunately does.

This movie actually takes itself WAY too seriously, in fact. As opposed to embracing the ridiculous nature, which might have made it interesting or even amusing, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is about as somber and brow-furled as "300" or "Priest," two movies of similar tone and style, which fully believe that what they're talking about is no laughing matter - even though all of them are stupid. At least "300" had the decency to be filled with so much blood and gore it would take quantum mathematics to calculate. "Priest" was PG-13 and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" has vampires with black blood.

Make sure that blood is sufficiently not-scary! We can't have red blood in our R. RATED. MOVIE.

What is the point of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?" It attempts to weave Lincoln's life around the idea that he was actually a stalker of the undead, hunting for vengeance after his mother was killed by a vampire when he was a child. After meeting a vampire hunter, played by Dominic Cooper, he becomes a skilled and inexplicably super-powered warrior thanks to the power of the training montage.

There were a couple puzzling things to me concerning the whole process of the training to become a vampire hunter. The first was that (spoiler alert) Dominic Cooper is actually a vampire. You see, in this movie, vampires literally are physically unable to kill another vampire. So Dominic Cooper trains Lincoln to do it for him. This is actually presented as a plot twist near the back half of the film, but it seems an odd oversight that Lincoln could train for evidently 10 years to spot and destroy vampires and never suspected one single time that his teacher was one of them. You know, since he's trained to detect them. Lincoln must suck at being a vampire hunter.

Like that one time Lincoln spotted a vampire due to them not showing up in a mirror, which should have also given Dominic Cooper away since he clearly could have been spotted in the mirror as well since he was standing right next to Lincoln, and shouldn't have made a reflection, but he either did, or Lincoln never noticed it or...yeah, oops.

"My god, he's bad at this. I've been dropping hints for a decade. Oh well. It's either him or Ulysses S. Grant, and that guy's a prick."

The second thing that puzzled me was the revelation that normal, everyday people are capable of acts of super human speed and strength, as long as they are sufficiently angry/enlightened. When first told to chop a tree in half with a single blow, Lincoln is understandably unable to. That is until Dominic Cooper drops some simple Dr. Phil psychoanalysis on him. Then Lincoln is officially a superhero. Seriously, he is. One tree. One swing. Just because Lincoln realized that his mother's murder made him upset. What a revelation.

You know, this kind of reminds me of another soul-reapingly stupid plot element involving normal, everyday people suddenly being able to do physically impossible things due to having some arbitrary mental block removed akin to asking them "Well, how do you know you can't do superhuman things if you've never tried?" What was it, again?

GAH! Damn it, that WAS you wasn't it, Timur?!

That's right. Director Timur Bekmambetov also did the insufferable "Wanted," another movie that insults us with sprinkling some magical mental pixie dust on the hero and saying that *boom* now they're a badass capable of things that are impossible. I nearly put a fist through my TV when I was subjected to the concept of "bullet curving," and it still makes me mad to this day just thinking about it. Some people rage over Ewoks. I have Morgan Freeman telling me that if no one had told me that bullets fly straight, I could curve them by stupidly flailing my arms like that robot from "Lost In Space."

It's just such a lazy way to make a hero awesome. It's boring. It's stupid. It's insulting. I don't like when a movie just says "Here, accept this" for no reason other than it "looks cool." At least give me a reason that is something better than "Consider the following: Do it."

I can't tell you how mad I was when "Mythbusters" wasted half an episode on "Bullet Curving."

By the way, that whole "not physically possible" thing isn't just relegated to chopping down trees with a single swing. There's also that whole thing with "collecting all the silver in Washington D.C., melting it all down, casting bayonets and cannonballs from it, transporting it all by foot 80 miles, and distribute it to an army of 90,000 men...all in around 12 hours" thing. That's fun.

I can't really think of much more to say about it than nitpicking the things that struck me as dumb or weird. Like I said earlier, it was so bland and standard vanilla that I can really just sum it up by saying that I'm guessing there will probably only be one or two scenes or moments from the movie that you remember. And it will probably involving running across horses.

LOADING VAMPIRE.ACTION.MOVE.374b.EXE...PLEASE WAIT...

I'm going to end this entry by saying what I figured I'd be saying before I even watched "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" - which is that I got far more enjoyment from "Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies." I'm dead serious. The Asylum's mockbuster was a far more heartfelt, fun, and enjoyable movie than "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." By far.

It was funnier, it was honestly more clever with history despite being somehow more ridiculous, it was absurdly more grounded in reality, but at the same time didn't take itself seriously which paradoxically made it far more believable. And there is also the issue of actor Benjamin Walker not being able to hold a candle to Bill Oberst Jr. in terms of playing Abraham Lincoln.

Bill Oberst Jr. didn't need vaguely defined superpowers to rock hardcore.

I'm serious when I say this, guys. The Asylum one upped Hollywood on this one. Given the director involved, I can't say I'm surprised.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is stupid. It's stupid because it's not trying. It has no soul, no purpose, and no sense of fun nor humor. Honestly, the best thing being said about it that I can possibly imagine is "It was what I was expecting." But that's the problem: It's exactly what you expected because it came from a cookie cutter.