Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

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.

Bekmambetov's disposable brouhaha at least achieves the minor victory of living neither up to hopes nor down to fears.

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.

The disconnect between intention and final product is a head scratcher.

Bekmambetov doesn't expect us to take the premise seriously, exactly. But he doesn't seem to want us to laugh at it, either.

The high-concept joke fades fast in this Abe-meets-vampires mashup, saddled with clunky 3-D, a lame screenplay, and actors as stiff as the statue at the Lincoln Memorial.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter may be a hollow sort of entertainment, but at least it's entertainment. And that, at least, is a definite improvement on Dark Shadows.

Instead of laughing at this movie, we could have been laughing with it and enjoying the experience rather than despising it. But Bekmambetov forgoes the obvious absurdity of the subject matter.

Even though "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" butchers and condenses its pulpy and popular source novel, the movie is simply fun escapist entertainment and pops off of the screen like a 3D movie should.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a film in which Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires, spends far too long believing it is something other than it clearly is.