Lincoln
DreamWorks Studios
150 minutes
Spoiler alert: He dies at the end.
You can thank me later for spoiling the ending and therefore hopefully zapping your desire to see the movie. If that is the case, I've prevented you from blowing 10 dollars on this listless, heaving waste of cinema space.
For a figure so towering, so revered and reviled as Abraham Lincoln, the bar for a great biopic is almost unreachably high. But this particular Lincoln had Pulitzer Prize-winning Tony Kushner signed on as screenwriter. It's based on (also Pulitzer Prize-winning) historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book Team of Rivals. Instead of documenting Lincoln's entire life, the movie zeroes in on a handful of months leading up to the hard-won passage of the 13th Amendment, the Civil War's end, and the president's assassination. The large cast includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn, Sally Fields, Jackie Earle Haley, James Spader, and pretty much every other estimable actor working in Hollywood today and their mothers. Also, Steven Spielberg is directing. (Say what you want about his recent, franchise-ruining output; he's still the man who helmed this, this, and this.)
The sheer amount of talent invested in Lincoln only serves to underscore and exacerbate the film's epic fail.
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