Burke & Hare
Burke & Hare
R | 05 August 2011 (USA)
Burke & Hare Trailers

Two 19th-century opportunists become serial killers so that they can maintain their profitable business supplying cadavers to an anatomist.

Reviews
ThiefHott Too much of everything
Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life
Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
Catherina If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
schf Poor Andy serkis going from working with professional actors with script writers and everything to this mess. An unfunny comedy that does nothing but bore and annoy in equal measure. He goes around robbing graves and being an entrepreneur eventually decides to cut out the middle man and start making bodies of his own. Shame they forgot to put any humour in this wasteful mess of a movie. I've always liked the weird stories of Victorian grave robbers less now after seeing this abomination of course. I would recommend any thing else that Andy Serkis has done over this movie even king kong. So in short don't waste you time with this
HelenMary The amazing Simon Pegg in this historical comedy based on the real life murderers Burke and Hare. Very funny all the way through, witty and with a star-studded cast of the English screen. Have wanted to see this since it was in the cinema and I can't believe it's taken me this long - well worth the wait! Some cringeworthy gross bits, but an all round a romp of a good film. So many laughs. Some at the expense of the accents.Reminiscent of Plunket and Macleane with dark bawdy humour and little colour, period pieces with lots of physical humour and style in keeping with how the times would have been, not too showy and "hollywood." Pegg and Serkis were brilliant together and Jessica Hynes is always a comedy genius. British film at it's best.
screamingape31 @ Girlystyle: Hear, hear. The story itself is not "laugh-out-loud" funny; I thought the situational humor very rich. I'm not sure I agree with Burke's romantic subplot, but the true-crime basis for the script probably needed some kind of leavening. The production design was superb and there were plenty of great British actors to fill the niches. Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, John Landis directing-- honestly, what is there to complain about? Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of good dark humor these days. I've always thought John Landis to have a good understanding of this genre (American Werewolf in London a case in point), but when I see this film I have a distinct feeling of "looking back". After all, dark comedy is a subset of satire, and if there's one thing lacking in the Industry now, it's a finely-developed sense of irony.
Leofwine_draca I wonder who thought a comedy about Britain's most famous graverobbers would be a good idea? A brief look at the credits of the guys who did the screenplay soon reveals that they're the ones behind ST TRINIAN'S 2: THE LEGEND OF FRITTON'S GOLD. That alone speaks volumes.Of course, the story is doomed to failure from the very beginning, because comedy is so hard to get right. The jokes are either funny or they're not. It goes without saying that I didn't laugh once during the course of this film. The gurning, mugging, getting-crap-poured-over-them gags aren't an example of getting it right. In fact, BURKE & HARE gets it very wrong indeed, which is kind of sad because back in the day John Landis was a great director. Now he's mired in the dreck.Simon Pegg plays Simon Pegg, with the addition of that Scottish accent he used in STAR TREK. Andy Serkis is Andy Serkis with a similar-sounding accent. Both seem to be in it for the money. Isla Fisher – well, don't get me started on Isla Fisher, and her extensive sub-plot involving some rubbish about the first all-female production of Macbeth. Huh? I thought this was meant to be a film about graverobbing, yet half of it's about bloody Macbeth, and the other half just changes history when it feels like it.Lots of effort was made in recreating 19th century Edinburgh, and the supporting cast is, frankly, astonishing. Tom Wilkinson, Tim Curry, Christopher Lee, David Schofield, Ronnie Corbett, Hugh Bonneville, Jenny Agutter, hell, even Stephen Merchant, Michael Winner and Paul Whitehouse. And what do all these fine people have in common? They're singularly wasted, either relegated to boring serious roles or blink-and-you'll-miss-em cameos. No, I won't waste any more time on a film I'd rather forget even exists – especially when you have a wealth of minor classics on the same subject (THE BODY SNATCHER, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, BURKE AND HARE…even DR JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE!).