Burke & Hare (2010)

While doing research for my review of The Body Snatcher (1945) I stumbled on to the existence of this movie. Now I was actually kind of surprised that I'd never heard of it before, I mean the cast is well known if not A-list, and its directed by John Landis, who granted he hasn't done much worth writing home about in 20 years, still has impressive comic bona fides. Burke & Hare is a kind of a lose, revisionist, "comic" re-tailing of the famed West Port Murders of 1820's Edinburgh, which shout out to Edinburgh is a city that can still manage at places to stand in for its self of 180 years ago.

Simon Pegg is Burke and Andy Serkis is Hare, two down on their luck Irish immigrants, her portrayed as not very effective con-men. When there latest "cure all elixir" is outed as a fraud the two are fortunate enough to return home and find that one of Mrs. Hare's (Jessica Hynes) tenants has died. They take the corpse to a med school instructor hard up for dissectible corpses (Tom Wilkinson) who tells them he'll pay five pounds for any additional bodies they can provide him. (There as subplot about Wilkinson's Dr. Knox being in competition for a royal prize for medical research with his rival Professor Alexander Monro, played Tim Curry.) It dose not take long sadly for the two to turn to murder to keep Dr. Knox supplied with bodies and themselves supplied with loot.

While Hare is mostly greedy Burke has fallen in love with an actress, Ginny Hawkins (Isla Fisher), who seeing him out on the town celebrating comes to the kind of mistaken belief that he's made it rich in the field of "medical supplies". Burke desperately wants to finance Ginny's all female production of Macbeth, and reluctantly goes along with the murders, which they always just barley pull off, bunglers that they are. Any way its not really that funny of a picture, there's some slapstick, and a few obvious name dropping jokes ("Dr. Lister, please don't take this the wrong way, but your breath is horrible"), and a fair number of cameos of British actors you probably don't know, the funniest of wish was  Stephen Merchant's entirely silent performance as a royal footman. Pleasant enough, at times mildly clever, and I wanted to like it. Looking back on it though I canna give it more then **1/2.