The problem with a great idea, these days, is you don’t have to get any farther than that. As long as it’s 140 characters or less and it sings, we’ll all get it and pass it around and, hey man, now you’re a genius! No need to follow through, just move on to the next thing. Work is for chumps. We’re not going to click the link anyway.

Seth Grahame-Smith is an author who understands this, having spent his brief writing career looking for a concept for a book or book-like object that would sell. That’s shrewd and it’s great business, but unfortunately it means he’s not trying to write a great book, just make a big sale, which is good for him and bad for the reader.

Grahame-Smith stumbled through “The Big Book of Porn” in 2005 and “How to Survive a Horror Movie” in 2007 before striking gold with “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” in 2009, a printed object that was not so much written as mashed up between Jane Austen’s public domain novel and some stuff about zombies.

We love a good joke, but this one created a monster, soaring onto the New York Times bestseller list before anyone had actually read it, just because it sounded funny. This vaulted Grahame-Smith into cultural mini-stardom, landing him TV and movie deals and propelling him forward to write the book, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

Abraham Lincoln re-imagined with a secret life as a vampire hunter is a pretty great idea. There’s just something about Abe that’s appealing for fictionalization. Maybe it’s because he’s a bit funny looking, or maybe it’s because he looks so darn serious and we just want him to have some fun. Bringing vampires into the mix is the sort of idea that’s so absurd and so much fun that you have to giggle, and it could easily be fodder for a great, silly, summer movie. Lincoln could fight the vampires with an axe! And have special Lincoln-powers!

This story would have a happier ending if the task of writing the screenplay for the inevitable movie had been handed to a great screenwriter (are there even any left alive?), but instead, Grahame-Smith, fresh off his pointless “Dark Shadows” screenplay,  got to adapt his own work for the big screen. The result is plodding and tedious in the vein of “Cowboys and Aliens,” the screenplay equivalent of lorem ipsum text meant only to fill in the space under the headline. 

Those four words—Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter—are the whole idea. There’s nothing else. It’s just a phrase, a hashtag, a meme, but it’s not a book or a movie.

This is a shame, because director Timur Bekmambetov has skills. His 2004 “Night Watch” was a fast, colorful and complicated work of fantasy set in modern day Russia. In that film, supernatural beings walk among us, unseen, waging a secret war between light and dark—standard concepts, sure, but Bekmambetov handled it with humor and energy and managed to tell a complicated story with many characters in a clear and thrilling way. His first Hollywood movie, “Wanted” (2008) was also surprisingly satisfying, even though it was an unlikely tale of super-assassins with Angelina Jolie throwing bullets around corners.

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” falls with a wooden thud, however.  With the exception of a chase scene that happens in, under and on top of a stampeding herd of horses, even the action sequences are lackluster.

Benjamin Walker is charismatic enough as Lincoln, giving both young and old Abe an awkward sincerity that is just right. But he is not given anything memorable to say, unless it is memorably bad (such as, “Always have a contingency plan”). This leaves the audience time to wonder things like: Why is he able to chop through a tree with a single strike? From whence are Abe’s superhuman Lincoln powers derived? Since the vampires in this movie can both turn invisible and walk around in sunlight, why don’t they just kill Lincoln any time they want? Why is Lincoln fighting the same vampires after 20 years have passed in the story—what the heck was everybody doing in the intervening decades? How are normal humans walking on foot able to travel 80 miles in the same time it takes a speeding train to travel 80 miles?

If you could go back in time to just after the original “Stargate” movie and somehow stop Roland Emmerich from making “Independence Day” and all the other terrible movies he’s made since, wouldn’t you have a responsibility to do so?

We have a similar opportunity now. Seth Grahame-Smith is a bad writer poised to embark on a long, successful career of torturing us with bad movies, and he needs to be stopped. Distract him with a shiny object or a piece of pie, convince him to invest his money in moon farms, anything… please