Review

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Pupils (from left) Bronwyn Bruntley (Pixie Davies), Olive Abroholos Elephanta (Lauren McCrostie), Millard Nullings (Cameron King), the “Masked Ballerinas” (twins Thomas and Joseph Odwell) and Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell) are all especially gifted in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Pupils (from left) Bronwyn Bruntley (Pixie Davies), Olive Abroholos Elephanta (Lauren McCrostie), Millard Nullings (Cameron King), the “Masked Ballerinas” (twins Thomas and Joseph Odwell) and Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell) are all especially gifted in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

Tim Burton's more entertaining movies are, sadly, not the ones that Hollywood shells out big bucks to make. When he takes his macabre whimsy with him to the great beyond, he'll be best remembered for his salutes to misfits like Ed Wood, Frankenweenie (both the TV special and the animated feature), Big Fish and Big Eyes. It's easy to get a sense that he had more fun making those films than Planet of the Apes or Dark Shadows.

Burton's new adaptation of Ransom Riggs' "young adult" novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children has his fingerprints on every frame. The wit and imagination of his better efforts are there as well, but they aren't as plentiful. Fantastic creatures and feats of magic don't seem quite so astounding if you know they're coming.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

81 Cast: Asa Butterfield, Eva Green, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris O’Dowd, Terence Stamp, Allison Janney, Ella Purnell, Finlay MacMillan, Lauren McCrostie, Hayden Keeler-Stone, Judi Dench, Georgia Pemberton, Milo Parker, Pixie Davies, Raffiella Chapman

Director: Tim Burton

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril

Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

While there is a limited number of storylines or character types for filmmakers to draw upon, the material in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children seems more extracted than written. It's as if Riggs had taken pages from the X-Men scripts, moved Professor X's school closer to Hogwarts and set it on Groundhog Day (or at least borrowed the conceit).

If my description sounds a little far-fetched, consider this: The film's hero, Jacob (Asa Butterfield), is a bullied Florida teenager who gets annoyed with his grandfather's (Terence Stamp) tales of an orphanage off the coast of Wales where strange children named "peculiars" do amazing things as part of their everyday routines. When the old man dies mysteriously, Jacob and his dad (Chris O'Dowd) head to the island in the hope that seeing the place for real will convince Jacob that this grandpa was delusional.

Of course he wasn't.

By taking a secret path, Jacob discovers that the orphanage was indeed destroyed during a Nazi bombing in 1943, but the occupants survive because Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) rewinds the clock just before the attack every night, leaving her charges and herself alive and eternally young.

Unfortunately, these kids' powers are pretty dull. One lass, Emma (Ella Purnell), runs the risk of floating away without her lead shoes, and Enoch (Finlay MacMillan) can bring life to just about any inanimate object. Olive (Lauren McCrostie) is a female Human Torch and Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone) can project his sometimes prophetic dreams for the rest of the kids to see like a movie. The other powers can be deduced even if you haven't read the book or even if you take long bathroom breaks during the exposition.

Oh, Jacob finds out he has a power as well, but it's not even worth mentioning. It probably helps that he's more relatable than the rest, but Butterfield, who was far more enjoyable in Martin Scorsese's Hugo often seems more like an observer than a participant.

Green projects a wise-beyond-her-calendar-years manner that's just about right, but many of the other adults seem to be competing with Burton's often stunning visuals. One wonders why familiar performers like Judi Dench, Samuel L. Jackson and Rupert Everett were cast when the filmmakers give them so little to do.

British screenwriter Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) does turn out some choice Queen's English bon mots, and Burton's heart is clearly with the oddball residents of the home. It's fun to watch Burton max out the capabilities of computer generated-imagery. But it would be even more enjoyable if the characters were equally imaginative.

MovieStyle on 09/30/2016

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