A dreamy teenager, Jake struggles to recover from the death of his grandfather. On the advice of his psychologist, who tells him to learn to separate fantasy from reality, he leaves with his father for an island off the coast of Great Britain. In the ruins of the orphanage where his grandfather grew up, he discovers a parallel world that propels him back to 1943. There, he meets Miss Peregrine and the peculiar children who possess magical powers for which they are persecuted. In their company, Jake learns to defend and accept his difference.
Before I start I should perhaps mention that, although I consider this a family movie, it is perhaps a bit on the scary side for the youngest member of the family. Anyway, personally I liked the movie and so did my kids.
It did have time travel in it which I, in general, utterly dislike but it is a Tim Burton movie so it was already a foregone conclusion that it would be a wee bit bizarre anyway and it had Eva Green, which is one of my favorites, in it so that kind of made up for the time travel crap.
The movie starts of by Jacob watching his grandfather being murdered by some mysterious being that only he can see. Of course everyone believes that he was hallucinating and so off we go with hospitals and shrinks and so on. Finally his parents allow him to travel to the island of Cairnholm in search of the mysterious Miss Peregrine.
From their on we wander into the wonderful world of “Burtonesque” bizarreness, fantasy and general weirdness. Naturally Jacob meets Miss Peregrine and her kids. Kids who each have some peculiar talent each more weird than the other.
Naturally there are a some bad guys lurking in the shadows as well. Bad guys intent on destroying Miss Peregrine’s shelter and … well, let us just say that they are not exactly concerned for the children’s wellbeing. I liked the bad guys. Both in their half human form and their more scary monster form. I especially liked Samuel L. Jackson as Barron, the boss bad guy. He really made an excellent performance.
The one person I did not like was Jacob’s father. Apart from being a jerk he looked like he was on drugs or sleeping pills throughout the entire movie.
On the whole this was perhaps not the best of Tim Burtons movies but it was still a good and enjoyable one. Decent special effects. The story worked despite the enormous paradoxes introduced by the time travel stuff. The characters did a fair performance. I did not regret the 2+ hours I spent on watching it.
_Miss Peregrine's_ could have done with a little more peculiarity. I understand that the lead is our door into this fantastical world, but a character can be relatable without being downright boring. Not an outright bad movie, but certainly not the one to put Tim Burton back on track.
Eva Green is golden but under-utilised, Sam Jackson can barely talk through his fake teeth, the creature designs are fantastic but pulled off with some very poor CGI. There is a little stop-motion to counter this, but again, it's not used to the degree it should have been. Which is really an apt description for the whole thing. Over an over, _Miss Peregrine's_ hints at a great movie buried somewhere within it, but what we end up with is an ill-paced mess. The only truly engaging character momets of the whole story are dropped as soon as they crop up in favour of the "Good VS Evil" rhetoric you've seen a million times before.
_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._
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