Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Year: 2016
Genre: Fantasy
Directed: Tim Burton
Stars: Eva Green, Asa Buterfield, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris O'Dowd, Terence Stamp, Ella Purnell, Finlay MacMillan, Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Allison Janney, Lauren McCrostie, Georgia Pemberton
Production: 20th Century Fox

Despite seeing this film more than a week ago, I have been avoiding reviewing it. Not because it is a particularly loathsome film or because it's a particularly big disappointment. To put it simply there is very little to say about Miss Peregrine that hasn't already been said. Everything about the film is basically spelled out in the trailer and despite having a name-brand director whose history of odd images usually has some kind of merit to it, Miss Peregrine remains, to put it bluntly unpeculiar.

The film is based on a trilogy of time-travelling young adult novels written by Ransom Riggs. We follow our seemingly normal protagonist Jake (Butterfield) as he traipses through "time-loops" to uncover the mystery of his grandfather's death. While doing so he comes across Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children which smuggles its young wards into these time-loops to protect them from villains, ne'er-do-wells and the odd muggles. Jake must then face off against a plague of invisible villains all while trying to convince his father (O'Dowd) that he's not completely off his rocker.

This all sounds suspiciously familiar...

As to be expected from the studio that continues to churn out X-Men (2000-present) movies, Miss Peregrine spends an awful lot of time building it's world and painstakingly maintaining it throughout the course of the film. Time-travel can be a cruel, timey-wimey thing concerning story structure thus watching the film beam-balance over the usual pratfalls is a wonder all it's own. Especially given the fact the movie crams in two out of three books into a single 2-hour film, I'm amazed nearly nothing collapsed in on itself.

Yet the movie not stretching into a mobius strip up its own a** is about the only thing really worth celebrating about Miss Peregrine. The acting is serviceable, the cinematography and special-effects are just north of Alice in Wonderland (2010) (no matter how many Jason and the Argonauts (1963) references you add to it) and the themes are right there in the pudding. It's a straightforward heroes-tale that fills the screen with old-fashioned, morose filigree. The kind that would have made the Tim Burton from twenty-years ago the obvious choice to helm the project. Yet like Rip Van Winkle, Burton seems to have just woken up and is unaware that Harry Potter, (2001-2011) The Hunger Games (2012-2015), The Maze Runner (2014-Present), The Divergent Series (2014-Present), Narnia (2005-2008) and Percy Jackson (2010-2013) already exist.

...let alone the iPhone 7

It's clear the studio was aware these properties exist, and seeing no future for this particular franchise; 20th Century Fox in their all-seeing wisdom decided to cram most of the Peculiar Children trilogy into one characterless film. It's a shame too because the story has so much to setup. So much that, when the inevitable book jump rears its ugly head, the gear change is enough to give any unsuspecting audience member whiplash.

If anyone were to benefit from further movie installments it arguably could have been the villains led by Samuel L. Jackson. Their plan, ambitions and all-around look (somewhere between the monsters of Resident Evil and a brood of Hot Topic fans) could have morphed into something interesting if given a wider birth. Unfortunately their purpose in the movie we got is just so perfunctory. That and their menace is totally undone by zany pranks that feel like they were rejected from Home Alone (1990).

Miss Peregrine works in pieces and if taken out of context of being done before so, so, so many times before, it kinda stands on its own. Yet if ever there was a poster-child for the common phrase "the book was better," this movie is certainly it.

Final Grade: C-