Review of Burke & Hare (2010) by Glen J — 12 Nov 2010

British comedy films have a very mixed track record. When they score, they score big, but when they miss the mark, they leave us all scratching our heads, wondering how so many talented people could have all messed up quite so badly. In the case of Burke and Hare, I regret to say that the latter is by far and away the better approximation of this really quite awful piece of cinema.

Put simply, it isn't funny. It isn't funny on an alarming scale. I sat and watched it for 90 minutes and not only did I not laugh, and not only did I not smile or smirk, but quite frankly from 10 minutes in I was bored beyond belief. It really is as if the producers never told John Landis that he was making a comedy. The man once hailed as a visionary behind such works as Animal House, Blues Brothers and American Werewolf in London, is so catastrophicaly dismembered from any notion of what is funny that it is staggering to think that nobody in the editing suite didn't have a quie word with him and try to sort this mess out. All he seems to want to do is awful visual gags that would have looked dated in the 1970s, and then play some painfully annoying Irish music over the top to make us all aware of when we should be laughing ourselves silly. Also, he seems not to care very much about the plot either, as scenes hang together so loosely that in parts you just have to make up in your own head what is meant to be going on, and put up with the continual cuts and location changes which break what little mood there may have been.

I cannot simply slate Landis alone though, as to be honest with a script as bad as this I very much doubt if anyone could have mustered a laugh out of it. It won't help either that every character in the film seems just on the edge of losing their respective accents, and you end up wondering in which particlar part of Edinburgh is this bizzare collection of dialects commonplace. The actors, for her part, do a passable job. Pegg is a good onscreen pressence, but is way short of being funny, Serkis nails the creepy and dark elemenst of his character but is another that forgot to get out of bed on the funny side during shooting, and Isla Fisher trys her best and as her role is simply eye candy then I guess she can count it as something of a minor success (although the whole Macbeth sub-plot with her is dreadful).

So, for me, the sole enjoyment of the film is trying to spot as many cameos as possible (something the writers may have been doing perhaps when they should have been working slightly harder). You get a real motley crew, from Chrisopher Lee, to Ronnie Corbett, via Bill Bailey and Tim Curry. My favourite performance was Tom Wilkinson though, who may be the only one to come out of this with any credibility.

It is hard to know how so many, with so much collective talnet could have come up with so little in the way of laughs. Whilst it is not quite as awful as Mitchell and Webb's "Magicians", it runs it very close, and any film that can say that is a film that you should seek to avoid at all costs.