Checked out Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the new Tim Burton movie based on a novel of the same name. I read that novel and it’s a fine premise that was kind of poorly written so I was hoping the movie would fix that.
The premise is that peculiar people – people with mutant abilities – live isolated from the rest of the world in time loops where they relive the same day right before a disaster, the day resetting so they can live their lives in peace. Our hero – played by Asa Butterfield – discovers one of these places as run by Eva Green’s Miss Peregrine. The bulk of the first half of the movie is just setup of the world, learning about it, and it’s really pretty boring. Very plodding and uninteresting.
When the movie starts to take off, it gets a bit more interesting and then when the movie diverges entirely from the book, it’s actually a little bit fun. But that fun comes at the cost of a messy final act that just tosses in chunky plot elements in a poorly edited way… but at least it has energy. For example, there’s a kind of nutty scene on a boardwalk – a fight between invisible creatures made visible via cotton candy and re-animated skeletal warriors with swords set to a techno or EDM soundtrack. It’s so NOT what the rest of the movie is, I was wondering if the film had just given up or just gotten really excited to be in a part not beholden to the source material (hint: the book did not have this scene).
Then there’s Samuel L. Jackson who saunters in with a fright wig, sharp teeth, and white contacts. He has seriously wandered in from a different movie and seems kind of intent on making fun of the movie we are watching. It’s kind of an interesting performance until you realize he’s not only in it for the chuckles and the paycheck but Tim Burton must have just shrugged and let him do whatever he wanted.
Time to also mention that this is a severely mental and warped family movie… it’s got some disturbing and disgusting scenes that are not appropriate for young kids (and some creature designs that are creepy too). There’s scenes of people eating people’s eyeballs and other scenes of someone reanimating corpses with live beating hearts to use as meat-puppets. Young kids should stay away – but the movie is PG-13 and that’s about right.
That is, assuming anyone really wants to see it. Too much of the movie is boring and sluggish and the more interesting bits are not long enough to justify wasting time in the theater to see it. Maybe fans of the book might like it but it diverges so much from it (at least the first book) that I’m not sure they wouldn’t feel betrayed. I guess if you are Tim Burton completest, it’s worth it. It’s better than Dark Shadows, at least.
Score: 65