Review by Anne Wollenberg
Stars Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Isla Fisher, Jessica Hynes, Ronnie Corbett, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Curry, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Bailey, Reece Shearsmith, Christopher Lee, Paul Davis
Written by Piers Ashworth & Nick Moorcroft
Certification UK 15
Runtime 91 minutes
Directed by John Landis
It was the perfect plot for an Ealing black comedy, and it also happens to be true. The tale of bodysnatchers William Burke and William Hare, who made a killing (sorry) flogging bodies to Scottish doctor Robert Knox (Wilkinson) in the 1820s, has graced the big and small screens quite a few times before, including a 1960 Hammer horror film and an appearance in Colin Baker-era Doctor Who.
John Landis’ take on the tale is very much a black comedy. As bumbling duo Burke and Hare, Pegg and Serkis bounce off each other nicely, though Pegg devotees may not be able to resist imagining how a Pegg-and-Frost combo might have worked. The film reunites Pegg with Hynes (née Stevenson), their first substantial collaboration since Spaced, although she plays Hare’s (Serkis’s) long-suffering wife, Lucky, rather than cosying up to Pegg – and while she doesn’t get that much to do, she does provide a few of the film’s loudest laughs (look out for the scene involving a pie, her face and a bottle of booze).
Burke and Hare could have been a much darker tale of the need to hunt down a serial killer bumping off random members of the public. But the pair don’t start out as villains. They’re just 19th-century Del Boys desperate to scratch out a living and, in Burke’s case, to woo ditzy actress Ginny (Isla Fisher), who mistakenly assumes he’s rolling in cash and asks him to finance her all-female production of a certain Scottish play about murderers.
Just as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street casts crooked officials as the true baddies, not throat-slitting Todd, Burke and Hare doesn’t cast much of a moral eye over its protagonists. The villains here are the local militia, led by Captain McClintock (Corbett), not to mention Knox’s rival, Dr Monro (Curry). But this isn’t even a tale of good and bad, or good versus bad. It’s a lot more fun than that.
When Simon Pegg makes a film, there’s a tendency, still, to expect Spaced with... So, Spaced with dead bodies for Shaun of the Dead and, here, Spaced with murder. Burke and Hare doesn’t serve up the same kind of sardonic wit we saw in Spaced, but it does provide plenty of laughs. What it won’t do is give you much of a chill, but as an Ealing black comedy, it’s spot-on.