How on earth this utterly dreadful, dire film comes to be up for 12 Oscars is completely beyond me. It seems that if you make any old rubbish about an American hero and attach a “Kennedy” tag to it, you will go far.

It is to the "historical dramas" genre what A Quantum Of Solace is to the "action/adventure" genre. I very much like anything connected with history, but it has to be made interesting and relevant, it has to have a plot and it has to have narrative drive. This film was dry in the extreme - it assumed an expert background knowledge of the events, gave no explanations and just ploughed on regardless through a sea of molasses of turgid and needless detail. It was like reading a school textbook from the 1930s, or even better, watching a live TV broadcast of the parliament of a foreign country but without any commentary or knowledge of what was going on. More than anything else it was like old fashioned school teaching of history, rote learning of dates and the sequence of the kings and queens of England - or the presidents of the USA - it's enough to put you off history for life.

In case you didn’t know, Abraham Lincoln was the American president who abolished slavery. He ended up getting assassinated.

I struggled to keep awake for most of it, and I was glad to get out at the end of it. I noticed that the co-director was Kathleen Kennedy - undoubtedly an attempt at a last hurrah for the Kennedy clan, but this should be enough to finish them off completely. Interminably boring and dull - avoid at all costs.