OCTOBER 3, 2016
“Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” marks yet another slide in the steadily declining career of Tim Burton.
For God’s sake, this is the man who made “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Ed Wood,” and “Big Fish,” his last really good film (and that was 13 years ago). Since then, we’ve been subjected to his oddball “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (give me Gene Wilder any day), “Sweeney Todd” (which now means that a legitimate film version of Sondheim’s musical masterpiece will never be made), the garish (though popular) “Alice in Wonderland,” a remake of the TV soap “Dark Shadows” (why?) and “Big Eyes,” about fraud in the art world, a subject about which no one cared.
“Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children,” based on an extremely popular 2011 novel by Ransom Riggs, seems on the face of it to be a chance for Burton to shape up. And for the first hour or so of it, he does.
Our hero, Florida teenager Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield), is instructed by his dying grandfather (Terence Stamp) to promise to get to a home in Wales for special children that he attended when he was younger. Despite the family’s misgivings, Jake’s father Franklin (Chris O’Dowd, charming as always), who had a stormy relationship with Jake’s grandfather, nonetheless agrees to accompany his son to the Welsh island.
Once there, Jake is told that the school no longer exists and is in ruins, having been bombed by the Nazis in 1943. Nonetheless, Jake visits the ruins and, entering through a cave, finds himself back in the 1943 school and comes face-to-face with headmistress Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, who’s quite good in what would normally be the Helena Bonham-Carter part). She introduces Jake to her peculiar children, each of whom has a special gift (fire touch, turning people into stone, etc.). This is kind of like “X-Men” with kids.
The introduction of the children and their getting to know Jake is probably the strongest part of the film. There’s real character development here, which is a refreshing change from recent Burton films.
Then the film’s twist is revealed (which I will not spoil) as to why they are still in 1943, and, as out there as it is, Burton got me to buy it.
Then come the problems.
Miss Peregrine (who, of course given her name, can transform into herself at will into a falcon) tells Jake that the school is threatened by the Wights, humans with white eyes who survive only by consuming human eyeballs, which they do on camera. (Remember, this is a children’s film.) Their leader, Mr. Barron, is particularly ravenous for children’s eyeballs. (Can you feel the film going off the rails yet? Just wait.)
Mr. Barron is played by Samuel L. Jackson, and while I love me some Sam, sometimes he can get a little hammy. He delivers a full serving of pork here and then some, with white eyes and Halloween buck teeth. Screenwriter Jane Goldman (who wrote the awful “Kingsman: The Secret Service” and the even more loathsome “Kickass”) gives Sam most of the film’s so-called jokes, most of which are desperate. (I got to the point where I was expecting Sam to ask “What’s in your wallet?”) I’ve never said this about Sam Jackson before, but he’s just awful. I hope he got paid well.
At this point, Tim Burton World kicks in. Among all film directors, I think Burton is closest in spirit to Donald Trump. Trump and Burton can keep on script for about an hour, but after that, all hell breaks loose. Once the Wights come into the movie, we’ve got giants with sticks for legs fighting Ray Harryhausen-like skeletons, and with this CGI madness, the film’s characters are forgotten, and the whole narrative goes out the window. Considering the work he put into establishing the characters in the first hour, it’s a shame he ignores all of them to indulge in his stop-motion animation fetish, which is getting pretty tired by now.
Still there’s the wonderfully disciplined first hour, so I’m not ready to give up on Tim Burton just yet. But I’m getting close.
GRADE: C
