Burke & Hare

Burke & Hare are from Northern Ireland and find themselves in Edinburgh in the early-ish 1800's, trying to eke out a living. Edinburgh physicians are beginning to make great progress in the study of anatomy and fresh corpses therefore become very valuable to them. Hare (Andy Serkis)'s wife runs a guest house and when one of the residents dies in the night, he and Burke (Simon Pegg) make a quick £5 from Tom Wilkinson's Dr Knox for the body. Although they manage to come across a few opportunely dead bodies for further revenue, Burke has fallen for Isla Fisher's Ginny and wants to finance her ambition of putting on an all-female version of The Scottish Play, requiring considerably more income than the odd dead body hear and there. Burke & Hare therefore embark on a scheme of mass-murder in order to keep food on the table and increase Burke's chances of wooing Ginny.

*****

Critical opinion has been divided on John Landis' return to the realms of black comedy. Some have lambasted it as witless, some have enjoyed its jaunty tone and the easy rapport of the principal actors. Whilst it undoubtedly cannot compare to either the comedic quality of Landis' Trading Places, Coming To America and Animal House, or the horror/comedy blend of An American Werewolf in London, it is unfair to write it off simply because it is inferior to some genuine masterpieces. It goes without saying that black comedies are exceedingly tough nuts to crack. Plenty have succeeded (Dr Strangelove, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Shaun of the Dead, Bad Santa, Slither and Fargo to name but a few), but that still leaves films like Observe & Report, Very Bad Things and Nurse Betty that are either pitched wrongly, or cannot work out how to see their premise through. Burke & Hare in no way belongs in the exalted company of the former category, however it does at least keep the tone even throughout, maintaining laughs, plenty of gore and bone-crunching and even raising a smile during the final exchange, which follows a public hanging.

These are not easy balances to maintain and that Landis manages it at all is commendable. Where he perhaps fails is in not grabbing our attention, our interest or our sympathies. It becomes difficult to care one way or another about their enterprise, aside from generally frowning on mass murder as a money-making scheme. Pegg is endearing and genuinely funny, but I found it difficult to get past indifference as to whether he won Ginny or not. Hare, who by all accounts was a genuinely unpleasant man (this is after all a true story) is well played by Andy Serkis, who always has a glint of the devil in his eye when he smiles, but there needs to be sense of the tension within them, that as good as it is to be making money, there is something innately wrong in what they are doing.

In the end, Landis clearly isn't interested in making a judgement call on Burke & Hare, which is fair enough, but with historic characters rather than a fictitious one (like, say Tyler Durden) something more than simply "this was them, this is what they did" is needed. Even in a film intended to be a fairly slapstick comedy, we need something a little less superficial.

In the end though, this is good, entertaining stuff. Not a classic by any stretch, but not a turkey either. You will laugh and occasionally wince, but probably forget why you did a few days later.