Josh Bell is the film editor for Las Vegas Weekly.As much as it would be nice to say that John Landis's first narrative feature since 1998 marks a return to form for the veteran director, the dark comedy Burke and Hare isn't remotely in the league of movies like Animal House or The Blues Brothers. Landis has plenty of experience with both comedy and horror, and Burke and Hare draws substantially on both, telling a story that has been adapted numerous times with the aim of giving audiences the creeps, only this time approaching it with a jaunty, lighthearted air. But Landis can't quite reconcile those two impulses, and the result is a nasty movie without any bite, a comedy that depicts gruesome acts with glee, but doesn't mine any real satirical humor from them. The director puts together a pretty impressive cast, though, which makes it all the more disappointing that the material is so limp. Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis play the title characters, a pair of ne'er-do-well con men in 1828 Edinburgh, always on the lookout for the latest get-rich-quick scheme. Edinburgh also happens to be the era's capital of modern medicine, with two prestigious universities competing to be the premier institution in the study of anatomy. When the head of the fancier, better-funded school uses his influence to deprive his rival of fresh dead bodies to study (those of criminals who've recently been hanged), the ambitious Dr. Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) becomes desperate for any fresh corpses that he can use in his lectures.
That's where our anti-heroes come in, first stumbling innocently enough upon the body of an elderly, expired boarder who'd been renting a room from Hare (Serkis) and his wife Lucky (Jessica Hynes). When they discover that Knox will pay them more for the body than they've been making in weeks of work at any of their previous schemes, the two friends get a little greedy, and start offing various local citizens to provide a steady supply for Knox's persistent needs. The two men are among the most notorious serial killers of all time, having murdered some 17 people over the course of a year, but Landis and screenwriters Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft depict them as lovable losers who are just trying to make a buck. Burke (Pegg) even has noble intentions, with his profits going toward wooing the beautiful actress Ginny Hawkins (Isla Fisher), who is planning to mount an all-female production of Macbeth. Hare is a little more dastardly, but even he starts out just wanting to prove to his alcoholic wife that he's able to support her. Instead of being evil, greedy men, the pair are made out to be bumblers who just want the love and respect of the women in their lives.
While this provides for occasional comic misunderstandings, the implications of the fictional motivation aren't sufficiently explored, and Landis settles instead into a groove of staging weak slapstick set pieces and having his actors mug for the camera in lieu of any actual funny lines. The consequences of the murders are shrugged off so easily that there's no sense of the horrors of the crimes, even in a morbidly humorous way. Burke and Hare might as well be swiping furniture or jewelry for all the turmoil their crimes produce. Throwing in various unrelated historical figures and events gives the movie a sense of grand purpose, but it also makes it seem like a connect-the-dots exercise in winking at the audience rather than telling a story. Landis moves the plot along briskly enough, and the actors give the whole thing a sense of genial goodwill, but that's not exactly what you want out of a movie about two craven murderers.
