See The Great Emancipator Waste The Undead In ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’

It’s going to be an Abe Lincoln-heavy 2012. Later this year, we get the much-anticipated Steven Spielberg-directed “Lincoln” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President of the United States. There’s plenty of acting pedigree to spare in that one, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder everyone!), and Sally Field, just to name a few. It’s sure to be a very historical-looking movie about the man known as The Great Emancipator.

On the other side of the spectrum is “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”. The best way to describe this is imagine putting Lincoln in “The Matrix”. He dons his top hat, grabs his trusty axe, then proceeds to behead the, well, undead. This is based on the Seth Grahame-Smith graphic novel, which is decidedly not historically accurate. In the novel, Lincoln’s mother is murdered by a vampire and sets him off on a lifelong rampage in which he wants to kill all the vampires and free the slaves…which are being used like cattle for the rich vampire set. The idea alone is pretty wheels off but this trailer actually makes this movie look pretty slick. It is a bit unstable seeing Abraham Lincoln leap into the air, do a 360 spin, then proceed to thrust his axe into a bloodsucking fictional child of the undead.

This was directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also made “Wanted”, which isn’t completely awful. It’s kind of cheesy and worth watching if only for the fantastic overacting job of Morgan Freeman. Rarely does he go overboard and Freeman goes Full Pacino in that one. There aren’t any big name actors in “Vampire Hunter”, but it does have the very underrated Anthony Mackie, Alan Tudyk of “Firefly” and Liam McPoyle himself, Jimmi Simpson. Yes, that’s an “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” character, which is a series you should memorize…and it has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln, vampires, or axe-wielding men with beards.