Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: Critic Reviews

The movie plays safe by cutting every theme down the middle - a swing that's effective when splitting wood or vampire skulls, but dull when applied to filmmaking.

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is such a smashing title it's too bad someone had to spoil things by making a movie to go with it.

Bekmambetov directs with gusto, and the forthright absurdity of the story, combined with its weirdly heartfelt self-belief is winning.

Despite its factual dismemberment of the movie's namesake, Hunter bristles as summer action fodder. Honest.

Both terribly silly and a lot of fun.

It's a sin against entertainment.

Possible resulting "fun" is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.

This insipid mashup of history lesson and monster flick takes itself semi-seriously, which is truly deadly.

Someone forgot to tell the filmmakers ... that the movie was supposed to be fun. Or at least smart.

The disconnect between intention and final product is a head scratcher.

It constitutes a moral sin, if not an outright moral crime, and commits a grave insult against history.

The violence quickly becomes numbing, and Benjamin Walker plays Lincoln without the sense of irony needed to keep the historical and supernatural sides of the story consistently entertaining.

A more entertaining movie than I remotely expected.

It sounds fun. It's a little fun. For a while. But Bekmanbetov shoots every killing spree like an addled gamer, working that slow-down-speed-up kill-shot cliche like a maniac.

Here is the worst thing to happen to Abe Lincoln in a theater since he attended "Our American Cousin."

What next, "George Washington Werewolf"? Laugh not, history profs.

The problem with movies based on a single joke is that a single joke is rarely funny enough to sustain the running time of a feature-length film. And with "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," the whole joke is in the title.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a Civil War-era actioner of questionable taste and historical accuracy but surprisingly consistent entertainment value.

Don't let the stupid title dissuade you from seeing "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." Let the stupid plot, the stupid history, the stupid action scenes, the stupid trivializing of slavery . . .

This film should be campy fun, but in Bekmambetov's unsteady hands, it feels laboured and unsatisfying.

Bekmambetov doesn't expect us to take the premise seriously, exactly. But he doesn't seem to want us to laugh at it, either.

The trouble with the so-called high-concept film is that too often the concept is the best thing about it and the actual movie essentially a series of rather rote, progressively more tiresome variations on its premise.

Bekmambetov ... stages hilarious, imaginative, almost free-form action sequences like nobody in the business.

The concept of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is worthy of a good chuckle or two, but the execution proves that sometimes a clever title does not beget a production of equal value.

Genre enthusiasts will lap up the mixture of action and fantasy, while history buffs who don't mind a bit of rewriting will dig into an alternative spin on the Civil War period.