"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" review

Peculiar in name only.

Fall is among us, which once meant a slew of new young adult fantasy flicks duking it out to be the next “Harry Potter” before getting relegated to the Winter-Spring dumping ground until, if the current status of the “Divergent” series is to be believed, finally dying out.

“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” picks the trend up with an admittedly fresher premise that unfortunately falls to the same traps that even the best of its peers succumb to on their debut outings.

Asa Butterfield plays Jacob Portman, a teenager with ambitions of exploring the world coming to terms with the death of his grandfather and the revelation that said grandfather’s tall tales of children with extraordinary abilities hiding from the world in a home isolated from time as we know it may not have been the bedtime fiction that he rationalized it as after growing up. After discovering the titular mistresses home for beings born with unnatural gifts, Jacob must uncover the enigmatic past that returned to claim his grandfather’s life in order to protect the children from threats both outside and within their world.

Directed by Tim Burton, who has had a hit or miss streak trending more towards misses for the better half of the about a decade, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” has been touted as a potential return to form for the director whose sardonic sense of humor and postmodern gothic infused visual style took film by storm nearly 30 years ago, and it’s not difficult to see why.

The style of ‘wide-eyed out cast teaming up with a group of misunderstood misfits to do what nobody else can’ storyline is exactly the type of thing that is up his ally and the moments in which he is allowed to indulge in such is where the film is most lively.

Jacob’s search for the home while operating around a parent too caring to be abusive but too negligent to be effective, while forming unique relationships with the children themselves are about the best that the film has to offer. What unfortunately ensues thereafter however is the unraveling of a production that doesn’t have much going on under the surface of its own quirks.

Burton’s propensity for humor and character highlights at the expense of story structure drags down an already problematic screenplay, which makes each act feel distinctly disconnected from one another. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if each element really managed to stick out on its own but there just isn’t quite enough pop to these characters and their world to make them memorable as depicted here. I certainly felt for Jacob but by the end of the film his journey felt like a dime a dozen hero’s journey that doesn’t even particularly stress the impact that he has on the danger.

All of the kids are aesthetically unique and well conceived but so underdeveloped that you may occasionally forget how many of them there are supposed to be. Meanwhile, the only truly noteworthy performance is by Sam Jackson who looks like he is having way too much fun chewing up the scenery for a role that would have been otherwise forgettable.

Every now and then, the abilities of the children get put to good use in a fun action set piece but “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” can’t overcome the technical flaws of its director or the problematic handling of its own material.

Where the movie falls flat in trying to be different, it unfortunately conforms to formulaic aspects of teen book film adaptations that have become rife for parody nowadays but the type of fantasy that it espouses is just too difficult to capture well on film to full effect.

“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is highly reminiscent of the earlier “Harry Potter” films in that the plethora of characters introduced that drive the narrative and require substantial investment are put on the backburner in order to properly layout the fantastical mechanics of the world that they inhabit, merely so the audience can understand the roughly 2 hour feature they will be sitting through. Even if the film had handled this well, taking such a hit to emphasizing the characters would have been an undeniable issue.

Sadly, the large and struggling cast combines with a clumsy handling of the movie’s fictional mechanics in relation to the story that it’s trying to tell, leading to a conceptually confusing third act that serves as a shining example to why these types of books are not only far better suited to the decompressed territory of television but have been moving more toward that format for the last few years.

Walking out of my theater and glancing over to a young girl gushing about what she just saw with a wide eyed sense of wonder that very well may have been on my face when I left “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” 15 years ago, a part of me wants to be easy on “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.” It’s not without its charms and the hefty problems of this film could have very easily saved a sequel from dealing with such issues in a few years.

Similarly to the aforementioned “Harry Potter” films however, there’s really no way around how problematic this film is regardless of what may or may not be over the horizon. It may even be worse given the 15 years of experience the industry should have with handling these things now.

5 Nonexistent X-Men references out of 10