Tim Burton has made a career out of showcasing oddballs and misfits in his movies and he once again re-embraces his quirky, bizarre sensibilities and his Gothic style in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It’s typical Burton fare, but it could’ve offered so much more.
Based on the worldwide best-seller, Asa Butterfield from Hugo and Ender’s Game stars as Jake, a young kid who receives word of his grandfather’s death (Terence Stamp). His grandfather left behind a series of clues in which Jake has to travel to an island in Wales to discover the truth. His journey inevitably leads him to an old home run by a woman named Miss Peregrine (Eva Green). She houses a group of young children with abilities that don’t fit in with normal society. These abilities are, well, peculiar.
We get an invisible boy, a set of masked twins, a girl who has a monster-like creature in the back of her head, and a boy with a beehive in his stomach. Basically, this film is a hodgepodge of X-Men and Harry Potter.
Samuel L. Jackson costars as Barron, the leader of a pack of terrifying creatures known as the Hollows who want to destroy not only Jake, but also all of the Peculiars as well. Jackson is always known for bringing a sense of energy and charisma to his role, but this is one time where I feel he’s severely miscast.
There should’ve been a better movie here given its premise and what Burton is capable of showing us, but the plot manages to be a traffic jam of time travel mumbo jumbo in which Jake has to transport between present day and 1943 where Miss Peregrine’s home is located. Some of the time traveling is either explained in a highly expository fashion that makes our heads scratch or simply not explained at all.
Even though I sound like I’m focusing on its shortcomings, I can’t deny that I had a great level of fun with this film mainly due to the kids’ abilities, despite the fact that the characters are only sketchily developed. Burton also does manage a great moment towards the end where skeletons attack the kids on an amusement park boardwalk and it does give us some amusing visuals to hold our attention.
Burton is the master of peculiar, but this sadly and barely qualifies as good but not great.
Grade: B
(Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril.)
