Professional Movie Review: Lincoln

Lincoln was many things.  A great president.  A city I assume I never want to visit.  Fun toy based on logs.  A bit too long.  And a pretty good movie with great acting.  However, it was not the action-packed movie with both Daniel Day Lewis and vampires that I was hoping for.  In fact, in three hours of Civil War history, I didn't see a single vampire get hunted, nor even bare its teeth.

I did, however, see Lincoln get upstaged repeatedly by whatever character Tommy Lee Jones played.  That's not to take anything away from Abe.  Tommy Lee Jones was just intense, amazing, and very likable, cemented by the ending.  I actually heard an argument the other day where someone was mad that DDL was being considered for a Best Actor award, since "nobody knows what Lincoln was actually like, therefore how can you say DDL played him really well?"  From the home movies that were recovered on Lincoln's cell phone, that's how.

The movie should have been called "The 14th Amendment" (or whatever amendment it was that freed slaves, I don't remember history too well and there's no possible way I could quickly research this information) or perhaps "Mary Todd Lincoln is constantly hysterical and it annoys me."  The movie was less a biography and more about a specific period of time and an act that changed history.  For the better.  That's why the ending pissed me off so much.  Spoiler alert.  He gets assassinated.  In a theater.  Everybody who's passed 2nd grade knows this, so why spell it out in the movie?  It's not like after the amendment passed, I was wondering what would happen next?  There was no cliffhanger, no possible sequel, and no need for a montage with text on the screen to let me know what happened to all the characters.  Everybody already knows.

I did learn some interesting things, like not all the Northerners in Congress were for freeing all the slaves.  You never really read about that in our history books.  That and the White House was constantly cold.  Lincoln spends most of his time in the White House walking around in a Snuggie.  Either he was secretly a woman (everyone knows women don't have blood, which is why they're always cold) or he didn't know how to dress himself very well.  It was this slight affectation that proves how well Daniel played the part.