Thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot details we can't reveal in our review.
Three unrelated points:
1) Okay, how cheap is the irony of Mary Todd Lincoln chiding Lincoln—“We’re going to be late for the theater!”—just as he shrugs off Henry’s offer to make him immortal so they can fight vampires together forever?
2) This film contains one of the strangest bits of piecework editing I’ve ever seen: Lincoln gets his ass kicked by the vampire who killed his mother, and winds up with his eye swollen shut and a huge cut across his nose. Then it heals. Later, Cooper casually bashes him against a bar in anger—apparently giving him the exact same injuries. I’m 90 percent sure that bar-bashing scene was added to explain the fact that Lincoln is wearing that particular injury makeup later, when Cooper explains about Sewell, in a scene apparently moved from earlier in the film. Overall, this film really feels like it was re-ordered a couple of times, and that some significant stuff was chopped out. In particular, Joshua Speed (playe by Jimmi Simpson) is a big part of the book, but he comes and goes rapidly here, with his relationship with Lincoln changing abruptly from scene to scene. He especially seems to have something major against Anthony Mackie as Lincoln’s freeborn friend—presumably a race issue?—but it’s never explained or addressed, and then when he suddenly runs in with the ransom letter (which he got how?) it’s “We have a problem!” not “Your friend I never liked got kidnapped.” It’s as though they became vampire-hunting partners in an excised scene, and then some slapped-in narration catches us up on that development later, en route to the plantation.
3) I know it’s a weird thing to get hung up on in a film full of vampires and a president with nonsensical superpowers, but it really bothered me when Mary Todd took off Lincoln’s hat and stood on it in order to see eye-to-eye with him. Those things were not made out of real stovepipes; she would have mashed it flat. It was like seeing someone successfully standing on a soufflé.
Oh, and for people who just click through hoping for ending spoilers: Lincoln wins the Civil War and defeats the vampires. You probably should have seen that one coming.