Watch CBS News

Movie Review: 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- How could Tim Burton, king of the quirky dark fantasy, resist something this peculiar?

Truth is, he couldn't.

Thus does Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children emerge as Burtonesque in the extreme, often playing like a PG-13 horror thriller for kiddies.

2
(2 stars out of 4)

It's a fanciful family-audience fantasy adventure about a 16-year-old named Jake, played by Asa Butterfield (from Hugo and Ender's Game) who, after a family tragedy, follows the clues to a mysterious and dangerous Welsh island, where he discovers the abandoned orphanage that lends the film its name.

Magical things happen there, and he gets to meet the eccentric residents, called "peculiars," and learns about the peculiars' special powers.

Which pretty much renders this an X-Men movie filtered through the idiosyncratic vantage point and lenses of Tim Burton and aimed at the young 'uns.

These misfits' peculiarities – such as turning into a bird or controlling fire or levitating -- are both celebrated and taken for granted.

Eva Green plays stern headmistress and guardian Miss Peregrine – named for the bird she keeps turning into -- while Ella Purnell plays Emma, the lighter-than-air teen who has antagonistic dealings with Barron, the terrifying villain played by Samuel L. Jackson, who seeks immortality and hopes his opposition to peculiars will help him attain it.

Using his grandfather's old photographs to guide him, Jake discovers that the fairy tales that he heard from his grandfather (Terence Stamp), which Jake has always assumed were invented, are grounded in reality.

They start coming to life as he travels around the island with his dad (Chris O'Dowd), and he realizes that his grandfather was neither making them up nor exaggerating.

It turns out that the monsters he used to talk about really did deserve to be described as monsters – or, more specifically, as eerie Hollows and dangerous Wights – and Miss Peregrine wants Jake to protect the other peculiars.

The supernatural adventure has been adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman – who, interestingly enough, wrote two of the X-Men movies – based on the 2011 Young Adult best-seller, his debut novel, by Ransom Riggs.

For visual stylist Burton, whose recent work (Big Eyes, Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie, Alice in Wonderland) is not among his best work (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ed Wood, Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice), this is a sub-par outing that once again visits the theme of outsiders who are seen as different and problematically peculiar.

The exposition-heavy narrative is so crowded, so busy, so detailed, that the through-line comes and goes, with character delineation on the light side and actors and actresses of age (especially Green, Jackson, and O'Dowd) underemployed and ill-used.

Burton treats the dark subject matter – which he's always drawn to -- seriously, and that's fine, maybe even admirable.  But he doesn't sufficiently leaven it for his young target audience:  humor and whimsy are in strangely meager supply.

In other words, leave the real little ones home.

Is there charm?

Hardly.

Fun to be had?

Barely.

Confusion?

Plenty.

Creepiness?

Enough to go around.

The intergenerational audience is thus invited to watch, but not to feel.

So we'll levitate 2 stars out of 4.  Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is certainly peculiar, but it's fantastical without being fantastic.

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.