2012 Ranked
Non-2019 First Time Watches Ranked
Directors Ranked: Timur Bekmambetov

Film #52 of my 100 Degrees, 100 Movies Challenge

Common actor from previous film: Mary Elizabeth Winstead

PREVIOUS FILM: Death Proof
NEXT FILM: Dark City

"Always have a contingency plan."

Well I wasn't expecting to enjoy this. Colour me surprised.

While I did enjoy this quite a lot, it is far from perfect. Some of the CGI is really bad (although there is a surprising amount of good CGI too). The story is very predictable considering how "out-of-the-box" the story idea is. It's just very paint by numbers. There was also inconsistencies with the rules regarding vampires. At first vampires can't hurt other vampires but then that rule is totally ignored later on. And vampires have an incredible sense of smell, why couldn't they smell all of those people hiding? Or why couldn't the redhead smell Mary Elizabeth Winstead? Because she knew who she was already. These inconsistencies took me out of the story a little.

Now, I thought the action scenes were also really well-shot and quite unique looking (minus a slight overuse in slow-mo). There were also just some creative shots in general that, while not mind-blowing, I didn't expect out of this director. I thought the train sequence in general was fantastic, minus the storyline flaw I mentioned above. While the story is absurd, I really like it. It's a cool alternate history/fantasy tale and it is mostly well done, although I'm not a huge historian when it comes to Lincoln so I don't know if there were any liberties taken there. I thought the world was well done and I thought the actors all bought into the storyline as all of the performances were solid.

Overall, I was not expecting to like this but it was a hell of a fun time. I wonder how many people decide not to give it a chance due to the insanity of the concept because I feel like the average Letterboxd score is unfairly low for this.