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Burke and Hare (2010)
John Landis takes on the infamous tale of the West Port murderers Burke and Hare – and loses.
Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis) are down-on-their-luck Irish conmen living in Edinburgh who strike it rich when an elderly tenant dies and they discover his cadaver is worth five pounds when sold to an Edinburgh doctor (Tom Wilkinson) who needs dead bodies for his anatomy lectures. From there they quickly descend into murder, and the film quickly descends into farce.
There is no reason why a serial killer cannot make a perfectly convincing anti-hero of a comic film – just look at Kind Hearts and Coronets. Actually, the scriptwriters would have done well to take a look themselves. Here, we feel no sympathy with the protagonists, their descent into murder is quick and accompanied by no sense of moral questioning, beyond Pegg's character looking a bit gormless and unsure. Worse, it isn't funny. The subject matter seems to demand black humour, but all we get here are pratfalls. People fall over, people get food on their face, or excrement dumped on their heads, they chase after a dead body in a barrel down a hill.
Any pretence at historical accuracy is abandoned with the introduction of Burke's love interest, Ginny (Isla Fisher), a former hooker who aims (in a ridiculous, tedious and horribly tacked-on subplot) to put on the first all-female production of Macbeth. It would be unfair to criticise Fisher's wobbly accent, since it seems apparent that nobody in the film is taking accents or accuracy of any kind seriously. It's quite clear about that from the start, and it would be fair enough, if only it was funny. But it isn't. The film plods along made up mostly of a string of one-joke scenes and celebrity cameos including Bill Bailey, Michael Winner and Paul Whitehouse. Tom Wilkinson is in the unusual position of falsely taking credit for the invention of the photograph again (as he did in the 1998 movie The Governess) which is an oddly specific sort of type casting. Or coincidence. Why, given the slapdash attitude towards facts, it was felt necessary to have a closing sequence saying what happened to the characters after the events of the film I don't know.
The music is dire. There is a good deal of over-acting, perhaps in an attempt to make up for the under-writing which really only makes it worse. The biggest oddity is not how bad the script is, but why, having read the script, any of the people in the film decided to get involved with it at all. I can only imagine the majority of them are feeling thoroughly embarrassed. (Interestingly, David Tennant dropped out before filming. Sensible choice on his part.)
The whole thing is a wasted opportunity.
John Landis takes on the infamous tale of the West Port murderers Burke and Hare – and loses.
Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis) are down-on-their-luck Irish conmen living in Edinburgh who strike it rich when an elderly tenant dies and they discover his cadaver is worth five pounds when sold to an Edinburgh doctor (Tom Wilkinson) who needs dead bodies for his anatomy lectures. From there they quickly descend into murder, and the film quickly descends into farce.
There is no reason why a serial killer cannot make a perfectly convincing anti-hero of a comic film – just look at Kind Hearts and Coronets. Actually, the scriptwriters would have done well to take a look themselves. Here, we feel no sympathy with the protagonists, their descent into murder is quick and accompanied by no sense of moral questioning, beyond Pegg's character looking a bit gormless and unsure. Worse, it isn't funny. The subject matter seems to demand black humour, but all we get here are pratfalls. People fall over, people get food on their face, or excrement dumped on their heads, they chase after a dead body in a barrel down a hill.
Any pretence at historical accuracy is abandoned with the introduction of Burke's love interest, Ginny (Isla Fisher), a former hooker who aims (in a ridiculous, tedious and horribly tacked-on subplot) to put on the first all-female production of Macbeth. It would be unfair to criticise Fisher's wobbly accent, since it seems apparent that nobody in the film is taking accents or accuracy of any kind seriously. It's quite clear about that from the start, and it would be fair enough, if only it was funny. But it isn't. The film plods along made up mostly of a string of one-joke scenes and celebrity cameos including Bill Bailey, Michael Winner and Paul Whitehouse. Tom Wilkinson is in the unusual position of falsely taking credit for the invention of the photograph again (as he did in the 1998 movie The Governess) which is an oddly specific sort of type casting. Or coincidence. Why, given the slapdash attitude towards facts, it was felt necessary to have a closing sequence saying what happened to the characters after the events of the film I don't know.
The music is dire. There is a good deal of over-acting, perhaps in an attempt to make up for the under-writing which really only makes it worse. The biggest oddity is not how bad the script is, but why, having read the script, any of the people in the film decided to get involved with it at all. I can only imagine the majority of them are feeling thoroughly embarrassed. (Interestingly, David Tennant dropped out before filming. Sensible choice on his part.)
The whole thing is a wasted opportunity.