Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children (review): Go to Hogwarts instead
Tim Burton's latest is not peculiar enough
You can see why Tim Burton was drawn to Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children. A sort of anti-Harry Potter, the material, adapted from a popular teenage novel by Ransom Riggs, doesn’t attempt to skirt the edges of strange and creepy. Instead, it leaps over the cliff.
Burton’s film trades in morbidity and moroseness, but also manages to offer enough uplift and hope to make it palatable for younger minds. It’s nowhere near as good as Burton’s foray into similar-minded material, such as 1990’s masterful Edward Scissorhands, but then nothing Burton has made in recent years has been much to write home about. Miss Peregrine (
) merely goes through the motions of being strange, without bothering to fully invest our interest. Unlike Harry Potter, it lacks a soulful connection with the audience. It’s like a remote, distant parent.
A huge part of the problem is Asa Butterfield as Jake, who discovers a time loop to a group of “peculiar children” with genetic mutations that allow them special abilities: control air, house a hive of bees in their stomach, animate inert objects, manipulate vegetation and so forth. They are under the protection of an Ymbryne, a being who can manipulate time and take the form of a bird, Eva Green or Judi Dench. Butterfield is flat, vacant, unappealing, with less energy that a sloth during its morning nap. He murders the film with every blandly spoken utterance.
Fortunately, a white-haired, white-eyed, pointy-toothed Samuel L. Jackson shows up late in the story to spark things up with a crazed portrayal of a monster who, along with a group of cohorts, feasts on the eyes of peculiars in order to maintain human form. The movie takes a headlong approach to the slaughter of children, and this gives it a bit of gravity that is wholly disturbing.
Burton pays homage to Scissorhands and, in one glorious stop-motion scene, the great skeleton battle of Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts. But for all its forced quirks and deliberate weirdnesses, the movie, grey and desaturated, stays mired in its own loop of lethargy. It’s not peculiar enough. —Randy Shulman
Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children opens Friday, Sept. 30, at area theaters. Don’t bother with the 3D upcharge, it adds nothing. Visit fandango.com.
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