Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) film review.

There is something perversely amusing about watching a pulpy B-grade movie pursue extreme historical revisionism. The title is as high concept as they come: a pithy description of what lies in store for audiences, should they choose to don the now blood-stained top hat and observe how and why the Emancipation Proclamation came to be.

Director Timur Bekmambetov reinvents Honest Abe, the 16th president of the US of A, as a fighting machine on assignment to track down fanged fiends. He sends them to hell using an axe dipped in melted silver.

Young Liam Neeson lookalike Lux Haney-Jardine stars as the man of the moment, who as a wee tyke witnesses his mother being murdered by a blood sucker – and thus grows up with a tumor-sized chip on his shoulder. After an unsuccessful attempt to avenge ma, Abe takes tutorials from a mysterious fellow named Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), who wears sleek dark shades seemingly plucked from the distant future.

Sturgess teaches him handy tips how to slay vampires (in short: carry a pocket full of sand to throw around, lest they turn invisible). Lincoln goes to a pre-Moe’s Tavern Springfield, where he works a retail job during the day and gets his hands dirty at night.

Adapted by Seth Grahame Smith from his own novel, the story attempts to draw a correlation between anti-abolitionists and slavery, but can’t make the comparison resonate. There are no shots, for example, of slaves getting their blood sucked by pasty white people with sharp teeth. The link remains tenuous at best.

If The Matrix turned the humble spoon into an enduring visual motif, Vampire Hunter attempts to do the same with a fork. There’s a lovely interpretative essay on recurring use of cutlery (mostly silver, of course) lingering here for film crit students with too much time on their hands.

Bekmambetov understands that when expectations are this low (audiences will want something fun and that’s about it) the key is keeping it fast and snappy. In that sense Vampire Hunter makes a decent fist of things, with amusingly loopy dialogue –delivered deadpan – and some slick and occasionally inventive action scenes.