Burke and Hare is a John Landis film starring Andy Serkis and Simon Pegg as the eponymous grave robbing/murderous duo in 19th century Edinburgh. The supporting cast includes Tim Curry, Tom Wilkinson, Isla Fisher and cameos from the likes of Christopher Lee and Stephen Merchant. Even if it doesn’t have any bankable stars, it certainly has a lot of recognisable ones.

It’s not a bad film. As a black comedy it is certainly amusing in places. However, it is never consistently funny and has quite a lot more moralising than I would have expected given the subject matter. Actually, it doesn’t really focus on Burke Hare’s murders much at all. It goes for a more scatter gun approach.

This, really, is one of the problems of the film (and much of Landis’ work): it’s a little free-wheeling and unfocused. A lot of ideas are thrown about and they are quite disparate and feature tonal shifts from one another so distinct they don’t really belong in the same film. It never really descends into farce on any one of the many plots and nothing is fully explored.

There is the main plot of Burke and Hare finding that killing people to supply to medical students is quite lucrative. There is also the plot of Hare’s wife being an alcoholic. The two main doctors in Edinburgh are manoeuvring against each other because corpses are in short supply. Then they are competing because the king is looking to offer his patronage to whichever of them makes the biggest advance in medical science. Hare is still having mad ideas as to how to make money, there is a protection racket being run and Burke is trying to finance an all-female production of “MacBeth.” There is simply too much going on, and too many strands that have comic potential left unmined. Nothing really descends into farce satisfyingly and there seems to be too many themes and plots competing for screen time and requiring too much exposition rather than simply being funny.

The acting, too, is a problem. There seems to be a conscious decision to make as much of the film set in the Irish community as possible and there is a recurring problem with characters’ accents. I have seen enough of Simon Pegg to know he can do some great accents and Andy Serkis is game enough, but they both occasionally lapse from Irish into something else. What is most odd is Pegg sometimes develops a slight transatlantic lilt even though he is English. Other accents fare even worse, with Isla Fisher’s in particular being awful. I honestly couldn’t work out who was meant to be English, Scottish or Irish and the plot doesn’t seem to know either.

Burke and Hare, overall, is a mess of a film hampered with some so-so acting and way too much competing for screen time. It’s also amusing at times, which makes its many failures even more frustrating.