Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Locations
Call Number: Blu-ray Action Abraham
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Rufus Sewell, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony MacKie.
Abraham Lincoln, history's greatest hunter of the undead, must risk the presidency, his family, and his life to protect America from the bloodthirsty vampires.
Blu-ray; Master DTS-HD, Dolby Digital 5.1; widescreen, described video.
Requires Blu-ray player.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Fails to Deliver on Its Excellent Premise submitted by Meginator on July 24, 2019, 10:14pm Having read and appreciated the book, I really wanted to enjoy the big-screen adaptation. I figured that the filmmakers could take either a completely serious or a seriously campy approach and still be successful, but unfortunately they seem to have settled for something in the middle that fails to adequately create or utilize emotional tension. The script never really develops its characters or provides convincing motivation for their actions, relying instead on exaggerated (if inventive and often excellent) action sequences and (admittedly creepy) Burtonesque makeup effects to maintain viewers’ interest. Despite an excellent performance from Benjamin Walker in the title role, I never became invested in his plight, and the interpersonal conflicts felt forced and flat, arising from narrative necessity rather than from the characters themselves. Whereas the book does an excellent job of tying Lincoln’s supposed vampire-killing exploits closely to his real-world biography, the film feels chronologically unmoored, skipping over huge amounts of time without plugging the gaps even with a passing remark or the consistent use of in-film captions. The technical details are spot-on, the performances are decent, I was fully prepared to accept the preposterous premise in the name of a good time, and yet I found the film utterly uninteresting.