Birds of a feather
‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ presents some recognizable heroes
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. In the fantasy universe of this film, special children are born with odd superpowers, and after being ostracized by society, they are taken in by a tough but parental educator who also has a superpower. That's Marvel's “X-Men,” you say?
No, it's “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children,” an otherwise amusing, frightening and eye-catching Tim Burton film based on a best-selling, if not at all original and apparently meandering 2011 novel by Ransom Riggs, also the author of “The Sherlock Holmes Handbook.”
In Burton's fine, at times marvelously hallucinogenic and phantasmagoric adaptation, we meet Florida resident Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield). When grandfather Abraham Portman (Terrence Stamp), the most important person in Jake's life, is killed in an horrific attack, Jake and his distant but caring father (Chris O'Dowd) travel to a remote Welsh island, where Jake finds an abandoned orphanage and, later, a time loop inside. That takes him to Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), who can transform into a peregrine falcon, and her “home.”
Jake also meets Miss Peregrine's students Hugh Apiston (Milo Parker), who spews angry bees, Olive Elephanta (Lauren McCrostie), who is a fire starter, Bronwyn Bruntley (Pixie Davies), who has the strength of 10. Enoch O'Conner (Finlay MacMillan) can return dead things to life, while Claire Densmore (Raffiella Chapman) has a monstrous mouth in the back of her head. Jake also meets the beautiful Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell). Her power is apparently to make Jake's heart skip a beat. Jake's specialty is the ability to see monsters that are invisible to others.
The children hide along with Miss Peregrine because evil creatures called — beg your pardon, H.P. Lovecraft — Hollowgasts, eyeless giant monsters with sword-shaped arms and tentaclelike tongues, pursue them. The Hollowgasts are the slaves of mad scientist Barron (a white-haired, sharp-toothed Samuel L. Jackson, having a heck of a time). Some might say that “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children” has it all, including a Danny Elfmanlike score by Michael Higham and Berklee School of Music alum Matthew Margeson and spectacular cinematography by Frenchman Bruno Delbonnel (“Amelie”).
I say it has everything except an original story. Green brings a wistful majesty to Miss Peregrine. The young cast is good. It may be worth the price of admission to see Burton deliver tributes to Czech animator Jan Svankmajer and, in a fight featuring animated skeletons, the late, great Ray Harryhausen. I'm guessing that screenwriter Jane Goldman (“X-Men: First Class”) did the best she could with the material provided. There are already two sequels in the book series. If they make another, I hope they have more to do for Englishman Rupert Everett, who plays a weird ornithologist here.
(“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” contains violence, peril and gruesome images.)