Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter  -- Cheerful nonsense, Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter isn’t pernicious or mean-spirited.  It’s not even particularly sadistic.  Honest Abe, the railsplitter, gets repurposed as a super-hero, a lanky martial arts champ who has attributes just like a Marvel comics franchise character – in Abe’s case, its his stove-pipe hat and magical, silver-plated axe that serve as his emblems.  After witnessing the death of his mother at the fangs of a vampire, the railsplitter sets out to rid the world of those monsters, aided by a friendly vampire (he eats only evil people) and a freed black slave as his sidekicks.  The movie is ridiculously fast-paced featuring hundreds of bad guys decapitated or bisected by Abe’s axe and there are chases involving vast herds wild horses (along the sides of enormous cliffs – I’m not sure where in Illinois this is supposed to be taking place), big battle scenes, and a climax involving a runaway steam engine, mobs of vampires boarding that train (lots of leaping, clinging and falling after the manner of the climactic mayhem in The Road Warrior), and a flaming railway trestle that looks like it is about two-thousand feet high.  The film’s action is modeled after Chinese kung-fu and horror films filtered through The Matrix and some of the fights are effectively staged – most are indifferently and incoherently choreographed, but since there are so many sequences of this sort the fact that two-thirds of them make no graphic or spatial sense doesn’t really matter.  Bekmambetov certainly has cheek and insolence to spare:  he imagines that the Union was almost defeated at Gettysburg by hordes of vampire soldiers, that Lincoln requisitioned all of the silver in the nation, and rushed it to the front to arm his troops against the monsters.  In one battle scene, Lincoln’s voice solemnly intones the Gettysburg address while the audience enjoys shots of solid silver bayonets skewering slavering vampires.  A silver cannon ball blows a vampire to bloody bits and, in slow motion, we see a battered silver fork flying through the air, rotating one of the space ships in 2001.  Bekmambetov established his reputation by directing gory, if witty, horror films in his native Russia.  Curiously, the set decoration and other accoutrements of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter are weirdly Russian – the movie looks great with vast, slow-moving rivers flowing through green and ferny forests:  it is like Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace and some of the scenes are staged to resemble that film:  there are ballroom scenes with the women incongruously dressed in Directoire gowns and with their hair done-up like Natasha in Bondarchuk’s picture; the great herd of riderless horses seems to hearken back to the famous Borodino sequence in War and Peace and we see lavish French-styled gardens.  The White House, in particular, is imagined as a country estate like something owned by the Rostov family.  Furthermore, the actors have a peculiarly doughy, pale even lunar aspect, they look like soulful Russians from the 19^th century.  Vampire film purists will be annoyed by the movie’s careless disregard for the rules – Bekmambetov’s vampire go about in broad daylight wearing “sun-screen” (?) and Johnny Depp-style sunglasses.  Vampires can’t kill one another, an important plot point, but they seem to be able to inflict endless amounts of physical damage on one another.  It’s annoying to watch a fantasy film that subscribes to no apparent inner logic.  I am hoping for a sequel:  Martin Luther King, Scourge of Zombies.