The real-life figure Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is portrayed in the film as having a secret identity as the history's greatest hunter of the undead. Abraham discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. And it's up to him to eliminate them.
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.
Rather than create an innovative style to complement the horror-history hybrid, he employs superhero clichés and hackneyed action scenes that only help distract from the ineffectiveness of the film's scant 3-D effects.
As a tongue-in-cheek action mashup, Grahame-Smith and Bekmambetov have, for the most part, delivered an entertaining (albeit campy) historical retelling.
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.
