Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children review
Trying to explain why Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children didn’t work for me is pretty tricky. Most of it is probably due to the fact that I didn’t read the book, but generally with a successful adaptation that doesn’t matter. The biggest thing that I can say about this movie is that it ticked me off a little. It’s a lot easier to talk about a movie you’re really passionate about, whether you loved or hated it, as opposed to try to talk about a movie you’re mildly annoyed at. It’s not like this is even the most forgettable movie I’ve seen this year, this is just a movie I’ve seen various versions of for a while now. It’s the perfect example of a badly executed adaptation.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’s major flaw is that it never shuts up. It’s a common trait shared by most book-to-movie adaptations, good or bad, but it cripples this movie. The first two acts of this movie are generally decent, taken as your slightly above average Harry Potter/X-men knockoff. The exposition just keeps building and building until it finally reaches what I considered to be a pretty forgettable-but-serviceable finale, only for me to realize this was just the end of Act Two and there was like thirty more minutes left in the movie. After that, the movie caves in on itself under the weight of ALL of the uber-specific rules suddenly coming into effect at once in order to create a climax. I had been mostly keeping track of all the rules up to that point, but then, I just lost interest in everything. It became very apparent that the movie, and probably by extension the book, was attempting to use its world-building rules to mask its lack of creativity ( I can’t confirm if this is a fault of the book because I didn’t take the time to actually read it, so you can correct me if I’m wrong). That’s a really big problem I have with a lot of series that fall in the Harry Potter-ish vein; world-building rules should be used to expand upon the possibilities of a story, not constrain it to stupidly specific plot contrivances. That’s how authors and writers write themselves into a corner and it always ends up feeling frustrating. I can’t even say that Peregrine’s falls into the worst offender category, but it’s certainly up there.
It’s a shame because there are definitely things in here that were fairly interesting. The movie has flashes of classic Tim Burton magic that make it just visible enough for you to empathize with people that were a fan of the book, or who were actually excited that Tim Burton (of all people) was making this movie. It’s honestly not a bad story, with elements of time travel, thinly-veiled Holocaust survivor undertones, and teenage depression galore, but again, it all falls flat under the web of the pointless world rules it establishes.
There is also just some stuff that falls so flat it actually hurts. In particular, there’s an action scene right near the climax that clearly looks like Burton was going for a bit of a Jason and the Argonauts homage, but forgot that Dub-step in the background doesn’t fit that kind of vibe. It’s also really, really apparent that Asa Butterfield isn’t really having much luck making his character interesting. It’s one of those “blank protagonist” roles that the target audience is supposed to project onto and will make all the other “quirky” characters stand-out by comparison. By contrast, Samuel L. Jackson’s villain character has the complete opposite problem of being entirely too cartoonish to be intimidating. Aside from the actual “peculiar children” who are all fairly entertaining, the only actor who really makes it work, is Eva Green as Miss Peregrine, but she’s just not in the movie enough to justify her being the title character.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will probably end up being remembered for what it did poorly rather than what it did well. On some level, that’s a shame because I’m guessing the fans of this series deserved better. Someday someone’s gonna come along and manage to tap that well of anxty/emo/goth/teen box office cash and ALSO make a good movie out of it, but it wasn’t Suicide Squad and it wasn’t this, so I’ve got nothing so far.
The Media Fire gives this movie a 5/10
