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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Burke & Hare (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | May 09, 2011 11:21 | Edited May 09, 2011 11:22

While the premise had the potential for a great yarn, almost everyone hams it up embarrassingly and this ends up tedious, insipid and unfunny.

William Burke and William Hare were two of 19^th century Britain's more memorable criminals, and their story has great potential for a rattlingly good cinematic yarn. But this isn't it. Burke & Hare might have been a blood-curdling, scary horror film, or - as it sometimes strives to be - an hilariously macabre black comedy. Instead, it's just tedious and unfunny.
     

The tale begins - and eventually fizzles out - in Edinburgh in 1828. Expectations are dashed almost immediately with a feeble disclaimer: "This is a true story...except for the parts that are not." Burke (Simon Pegg) and Hare (Andy Serkis) are a couple of petty expatriate Irish crims, down on their luck and on the look-out for a lucrative new scam. The two are soon engaged in a nice little earner, whereby they rob graves and sell fresh corpses - for anatomical demonstrations - to the equally unscrupulous Dr. Knox, played by Tom Wilkinson, the only cast member who doesn't ham it up embarrassingly. The rot sets in, to employ an appropriately putrescent phrase, when they run out of extant cadavers and have to start increasing the death rate themselves.
     

Burke & Hare is littered with corny walk-on cameos from famous British comedians and actors (including the likes of Ronnie Corbett, Bill Bailey, Christopher Lee, Tim Curry, and Paul Whitehouse), but the whole is several tons less than the sum of its parts. To make matters even worse, there's a pitiably wrongheaded attempt to make the murderous Burke sympathetic by having him fall for an actress (Isla Fisher) and commit his crimes "for love." It's hard to imagine that a film with liberal lashings of blood, maggots and violence could be bland and insipid, but director John Landis (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf In London) and co. have proved here that it's possible. Excruciating.