Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children starts off well. It is charming and slightly creepy like all good Tim Burton films, but it all almost falls apart in the end. Thankfully it gets its act together just before the ending credits. It is just a shame that it couldn’t be good the whole way through.
Miss Peregrine’s follows a boy named Jacob “Jake” Portman (Asa Butterfield) who grew up listening to his grandfather’s (Terence Stamp) amazing stories about a home for children with strange powers, and one day he decides he needs to check these stories out for himself. Of course he gets swept up in an amazing adventure in which he will need to rely on the children’s mutations peculiarities, and maybe just learn something about himself.
This movie feels like Tim Burton wanted to make a longer movie. It takes its time setting the table for Jake’s adventure, but then it rushes through the rest of the movie, so when Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children gets to the big showdown it is rushed and campy, and there is almost no tension. Which is a shame because there is room out there for a strange version of the X-Men with weird and creepy kids.
For the most part the actors do a good job. Especially Eva Green as the titular Miss Peregrine. She is delightfully odd, but you can tell she cares about the kids in her care. The only real breakdown is that Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell, who plays Emma Bloom an Air Bender, have no real chemistry together. They are fine separately, but awkward together.
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is a fun film, but it falls short of being a great film. Whether or not you should see it in theaters depends on how much you like Tim Burton or the source material. If you are ambivalent about those two things you can probably wait for this movie to hit Red Box or Netflix. Still, in the end I enjoyed myself, and that is why we go to the movies in the first place.