'Heart of the Sea' quickly sinks

You'd be better off re-reading Moby-Dick than watching this lame attempt to explain the novel's inspiration.

Director Ron Howard's big whale movie slaps its enormous tail fins against a rising sea of Christmas entertainment, but produces only a dull thud.

Spread the blame: Lame dialogue, overly familiar characters and an unforgivably bland central performance are among the prime factors keeping the movie from attaining epic status.

One expected better because In the Heart of the Sea tells the story of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that was destroyed by a huge whale in 1820. The crew of the Essex was stranded for months after their ship was wrecked in the southern Pacific.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it could be for two reasons: The story of the Essex reportedly inspired (at least in part) Herman Melville's masterwork, Moby-Dick.

Or perhaps you're aware of Nathaniel Philbrick's award winning nonfiction account of the Essex's tragic fate, also called In the Heart of the Sea and the principal source for Charles Levitt's soggy, cliched screenplay.

Howard frames his story with a visit by Melville (Ben Whishaw) to Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the last remaining Essex survivor. With some prodding from his wife, a reluctant Nickerson begins to recount what happened to him and his shipmates some 30 years earlier.

At the time of the Essex's voyage, Nickerson was a cabin boy. Tom Holland portrays Nickerson in the movie's flashback scenes.

Howard makes a point of reminding us that in the early part of the 19th century, whale oil was the elixir that kept society's lamps burning, a bulwark of the economy and, therefore, a very big deal.

The movie's principal human conflict arrives early on. George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) lands his position as captain of the Essex because of family connections. He takes the job that had been promised to Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), an able first mate.

Our sympathies are meant to lean toward Chase, clearly the more competent and manly of this pair of antagonists. Besides, who wants to root for a legacy case who lands a job he hasn't really earned.

Cillian Murphy signs on as the Essex's second mate, but doesn't have enough to do, especially considering that Hemsworth's performance seems to consist mostly of looking ruggedly handsome.

Howard devotes considerable attention to the brutality and sometimes repellant demands of whaling. At one point, Nickerson is ordered to climb into a dead whale's blowhole so that he can retrieve buckets of oil, a job that's difficult to accomplish without losing one's lunch.

When the Essex finally encounters the heavyweight champion of whales -- the product of a team of CGI wizards -- the Essex and the movie are ready to capsize. A behemoth of a creature, the whale has a speckled gray body that's bigger than the Essex, but it's no Moby-Dick.

Once relegated to small boats, crew members struggle to survive, even resorting to cannibalism, the principal cause of the terrible guilt that burdens Nickerson in his intermittently presented conversations with Melville.

Melville took this story and made something towering, great and classic of it: Too bad he wasn't around to help with the script for Heart of the Sea, which leaves only intimations of what might have been in its otherwise forgettable wake.

Lincoln, vampires and big-time blood

This Abe doesn't have it in for Congress; he's off to fight vampires.

If you're a fan of wacked-out movie ideas, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter has just about everything else beat by a mile. The title alone tells you just how crazy this film will be. Consider: Lincoln evidently didn't have enough trouble ending slavery, fighting the Civil War and desperately try to hold the union together, he also had to fight hordes of vampires, who allied themselves with the Confederacy and slavery.

Some things don't need to be parodied, they need only to be quoted, and that's how it is with much of this vividly realized, intermittently entertaining and often ludicrous adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's 2010 novel. Grahame-Smith wrote the screenplay, and Timur Bekmambetov -- known for the Night Watch and Day Watch movies -- directedmostly to mixed effect.

Not surprisingly, the Lincoln we meet in this action-oriented adventure isn't a mirror image of the Lincoln of history books, unless you happened to be exposed to texts depicting honest Abe wielding a silver-tipped ax and acting very much like a summer-movie action hero. It's Abe vs. one vicious vampire after another as the movie plies its way through quasi-historical waters.

Motivated by vengeance (a vampire killed his mother) and a desire to battle the dark side, Lincoln makes the ax his weapon of choice because of early days spent splitting rails. The story follows Lincoln from his boyhood to the presidency with vampires linking different periods in the leader's life.

Benjamin Walker makes a stalwart if not entirely prepossessing adult Lincoln, a character surrounded by a large supporting cast that includes Dominic Cooper (as a good vampire); Rufus Sewell (as the movie's very bad vampire); Anthony Mackie (as a black childhood pal of Lincoln grown into an ally in the fight against slavery); Mary Elizabeth Winstead (as Mary Todd Lincoln); Marton Csokas (as Lincoln's sworn enemy) and many more.

As you probably can tell, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is not an A-list production -- at least as far as casting is concerned.

It probably doesn't matter because action tramples character in a story that applies a simplistic moral overlay to its abundant collection of weirdness. Lincoln eventually moves beyond a desire for vengeance to pit himself against an evil that threatens his beloved country, and this Lincoln never wavers in his opposition to slavery.

You get the idea: The movie plays like another big-screen comic book, sketching its story in the kind of broad strokes that make nuance about as welcome as silver bullets at a vampire convention.

Bekmambetov employs CGI to useful effect in creating the movie's 19th century backdrops, and he piles on the action, most notably in a bleary scene involving a horse stampede and a finale that includes a burning bridge and a runaway locomotive.

History buffs will find fleeting historical references -- the Gettysburg address and Emancipation Proclamation -- that presumably are meant to ground a fantastical story in the soil of recognizable history.

If a movie such as this is going to have any credibility, it must be centered on a president who has mythic stature. Lincoln works. Nixon wouldn't.

Although Bekmambetov specializes in severed heads, assorted gore and high octane fighting in which bodies seem to freeze in mid-air, I found the action a bit repetitive. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter didn't live up to my expectations for something preposterously grand, but it provided a fair measure of unintended chuckles and a bit incidental fun as it tried to swell to mythic proportions.