Warning: Dumb MTV video below autoplays.

When I say “promises torture, pain, and anguish,” I mean that entirely for any person actually watching it.

To be fair, a production video and some awful marketing material does not do any film justice, but I’m struggling to find nice things to say about a project that has so consistently had “bad idea” following it around in exploding, neon Ben-Hur letters. This concept is a joke that lives in a hastily drawn, one-off webcomic passed around for a day on Facebook, not a feature film. Shit like this is why:

I could care less about a film poster cheapening an important American icon or anything but if you’re gonna go for an idea so obvious and tacky, at least put the effort in so that it doesn’t look like shit. Perhaps it’s just an indication of how disposable individual pieces of imagery are in today’s hype whirlpool, but I’m still a little surprised in my heart when a studio lets such sub-standard work represent their multimillion dollar products. I’ve seen better photoshop comp work on a box of Kraft Mac’n’cheese.

Lest you think the pessimism is borne entirely out of bad posters, the EW stills from the film don’t have much to offer either…

Look, I have my doubts when Spielberg takes on one of these gimmicky cash-in novels that are better left sitting on the “book” table at an Urban Outfitters, so this is going to be exceptionally tough to sell to a butthole like me. The trailer has a lot to prove.

I will say that Benjamin Walker looks like a charming, classy guy in the MTV behind-the-scenes video below, but I don’t envy his position of breaking out in this cheese-fest that will so quickly be compared to the Daniel-Day Lewis drama. Obviously both films have two clearly different goals, but this won’t be the case of some stuffy prestige drama that nobody will see outclassing the blockbuster entertainment. No, this could well be a classy, blockbuster biopic making this dumb action flick look like the immature high-school notebook doodle it looks to be.

But let loose in the comments. I can’t imagine there are some folks out there interested in this, or at least don’t think it deserves such viciousness. What are you hoping to see from Abraham Lincoln’s hidden nightlife?

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Source | Indiewire, EW