On the Couch

Simon Pegg is a clever man. He’s also a very funny bloke. From his writing credits on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to entertaining turns in Run Fat Boy, Run or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People he’s normally a very safe bet for an evening’s entertainment.

The very same can be said of Andy Serkis who, groundbreaking performances as Gollum and King Kong notwithstanding, also has a solid career of straight acting roles and can usually be trusted to show up in quality, or at least decently distracting, fare.
So what the hell the pair of them are doing in Burke and Hare – a celebrity-packed but depressingly half-assed effort directed by John Landis – is beyond reason.
Based on the infamous Edinburgh serial killers, the film is a grisly comedy in the Sweeney Todd mould but without any of the songs (a good thing), style or humour (sub-optimal for a flick selling itself as a comedy).
In real life, the pair rose to notoriety at a time when the study of anatomy was in its infancy, cadavers were in high demand and grave robbing the bodies of the recently dead was an unfortunately common and lucrative crime. When they decide the rate of natural attrition just isn’t fast enough for their liking, the pair take matters into their own hands and start killing people in order to keep up with the ever-growing demands of aspiring anatomists.
Obviously in the hands of John Landis, the man who gifted a grateful world with films like The Blues Brothers and Trading Places, the harsher edges are taken off the true story and Burke and Hare are transmogrified from murderous, money-hungry maniacs into happy-go-lucky losers who fall into the habit of homicide while innocently looking to provide for their family (Burke) and find a nice girl to settle down with (Hare) respectively.
As the two spiral deeper into their mire of moral turpitude, matters are complicated by Hare’s infatuation with a young actress, Ginny (Isla Fisher), set on finding herself a rich man to help assist her in her dreams of thespianism, the interests of a local crime boss who wants a piece of the fledgling business and a dogged militia captain, played by Ronnie Corbett of all people, who is determined to get to the bottom of the spate of disappearances.
The humour, such as it is, comes mostly from people falling over and bodily effluent being sprayed at inappropriate moments. High brow it ain’t. To be honest, it’s a stretch for it to even reach low brow. Without Pegg and Sirkis’s likable presences and the always engaging Fisher it would have been barely on a par with a bad Carry On remake.
Amongst the many embers of good ideas that do little other than smoulder suggestively and then get snuffed out before developing into anything that could conceivably be called entertaining, is a sub-plot involving Tom Wilkinson and Tim Curry as two famous doctors competing for the favour of the King; Bill Bailey showing his face as a hangman and narrator of sorts and anything at all involving Isla Fisher and her all-female version of MacBeth.
Sadly that’s not nearly enough to redeem a hopless mess.
It’s a weird and somewhat telling thing to have more to say about Milla Jovovich’s performance in a film where she shares screen time with Robert De Niro.
That, however, is how it is with Stone, John Curran’s ponderous snorefest about an arsonist (Edward Norton) trying to get parole after nearly a decade, his sexually rapacious wife, Lucetta (Jovovich) and Jack Mabry (De Niro), the parole board officer they try to manipulate.
As Lucetta, Jovovich is the only performer in the film that really sparks any interest from the viewer, crackling with vulnerability and an unhealthy dose of craziness.
As Stone, Norton delivers a predictably solid performance but there is very little to the aspiring parolee that would make you care whether he is faking or not. De Niro too sleepwalks through proceedings as mumbly enigma Mabry. He’s not a nice man. He has problems and depths. We just don’t care.
It’s symptomatic of the film as a whole. All the interesting parts are obscured by a structureless, pointless, feckless story that isn’t even a fraction as compelling as it thinks it is.