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2010
Dir. by John Landis
Where did this movie come from or go? A black comedy sticking fairly close to an actual story involving 19th-century grave robbers in Scotland who are ultimately helping create the world's first, accurate medical dictionary? Throw in Landis at the helm and a killer cast and how could you end up with something just so adequate?
The story itself follows the main characters of Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis), two hapless entrepreneurs who come to discover that there's money at stake in providing corpses to one of two competing medical schools in 19th-century Edinburgh. While Dr. Monro (Tim Curry) heads one with ignorant study, Dr. Knox (Tom Wilkinson) heads the other and sees an opportunity with the new possibilities of photography to get himself fame and honor. The trouble is, Knox needs corpses - lots of them, and fast.
Enter our heroes who come to Knox' attention while disposing of an old lodger in their tenement house. With some encouragement from their landlady Lucky (Spaced's Jessica Hynes) they soon start in with finding the recently-deceased to provide to Knox. However, as the elderly aren't dropping off as quickly as they'd like, they soon have to move to more creative ways to obtain fresh corpses. Without actively violently killing anyone they manage to stage any number of accidents that give them what they're after.
With that story alone the film would've progressed comedically but a sidestory involving Burke's attempts at finding love and then bankrolling the girl of his dreams' (Isla Fisher) all-female production of Macbeth the pace gets screwy and the introduction of other characters just makes the story a bit messy. While this does provide some motivation and sympathy to Burke & Hare's activities it nonetheless consistently threatens and sometimes succeeds in derailing the overall story.
The numerous cameos are worth noting (it's nice to see Christopher Lee, Ray Harryhausen and Bill Bailey all in a film together) and watching as is the Animal House-type ending of showing info on screen asking “where are they now?†questions. But the comedic timing and pacing just aren't there, even with such a cast and seemingly ripe story for a good black comedy.
Rating: C-
But I'll bet it isn't.