This is one of those "mid Tim Burton" movies, not up there with Ed Wood, Batman Returns or Big Fish but not down the well with Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory either.
Burton seemed like the perfect choice to deal with the material (adapted from the first book of a young adult fantasy series), as the director has always been enamored with bittersweet stories of creepy/poetic outcasts. The result is watchable but beyond its full potential.
Young Jake (Asa Butterfield) loses his beloved grampa (the great Terence Stamp), who used to tell him incredible tales from his youth before being mysteriously killed. Jake visits an island in Wales to find out his grampa's stories were true: he finds a school with a group of superpowered children and teens, tutored by Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, always interesting).
The headmistress and her pupils are stuck in a time loop in an ever-repeating day of 1943 - which Miss Peregrine resets every evening before a Nazi bombardment destroys their mansion - hiding from a group of sinister creatures hunting them.
The first act is a little slow but the second gets genuinely compelling - I was on board with the movie at that point. There are some neat ideas: the "peculiar children" of unusual skills enjoying a sheltered, unending youth but unable to grow up and lead an actual life; Miss Peregrine Groundhog-Daying her routine, from answering the same phone call again and again to slaying a monster always attacking at the same hour. There were enough ideas for a whole mini-series in this section of the film.
Sadly, the last act peters out into something conventional and nowhere as intriguing, the typical showdown with the Bad Guys™ - including a ghoulish Samuel L. Jackson, a usually fantastic actor who here hams it up like (appropriately) there is no tomorrow. The rules of time travel established earlier get sloppy and confusing; the themes of choice and loss get a very hasty "love trumps all" resolution. Pity, there was a great concept back in that second act. It's also weird how the script desperately hastens to tie up all loose ends, whereas the source material ended with an effective cliffhanger (and the book series is still going on - five novels and counting). I appreciate giving some closure in case you don't get to make a sequel, but this felt like deliberately torpedoing any chance of a second movie.
Parental advice, this isn't for smaller children (younger than 10). The tone is mostly lighthearted but, in typical Burton fashion, there are creepy creatures (which look like they swam all the way from Silent Hill) and grotesque moments, including monsters gorging on their victims' eyeballs... yeah.
6,5/10
Burton seemed like the perfect choice to deal with the material (adapted from the first book of a young adult fantasy series), as the director has always been enamored with bittersweet stories of creepy/poetic outcasts. The result is watchable but beyond its full potential.
Young Jake (Asa Butterfield) loses his beloved grampa (the great Terence Stamp), who used to tell him incredible tales from his youth before being mysteriously killed. Jake visits an island in Wales to find out his grampa's stories were true: he finds a school with a group of superpowered children and teens, tutored by Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, always interesting).
The headmistress and her pupils are stuck in a time loop in an ever-repeating day of 1943 - which Miss Peregrine resets every evening before a Nazi bombardment destroys their mansion - hiding from a group of sinister creatures hunting them.
The first act is a little slow but the second gets genuinely compelling - I was on board with the movie at that point. There are some neat ideas: the "peculiar children" of unusual skills enjoying a sheltered, unending youth but unable to grow up and lead an actual life; Miss Peregrine Groundhog-Daying her routine, from answering the same phone call again and again to slaying a monster always attacking at the same hour. There were enough ideas for a whole mini-series in this section of the film.
Sadly, the last act peters out into something conventional and nowhere as intriguing, the typical showdown with the Bad Guys™ - including a ghoulish Samuel L. Jackson, a usually fantastic actor who here hams it up like (appropriately) there is no tomorrow. The rules of time travel established earlier get sloppy and confusing; the themes of choice and loss get a very hasty "love trumps all" resolution. Pity, there was a great concept back in that second act. It's also weird how the script desperately hastens to tie up all loose ends, whereas the source material ended with an effective cliffhanger (and the book series is still going on - five novels and counting). I appreciate giving some closure in case you don't get to make a sequel, but this felt like deliberately torpedoing any chance of a second movie.
Parental advice, this isn't for smaller children (younger than 10). The tone is mostly lighthearted but, in typical Burton fashion, there are creepy creatures (which look like they swam all the way from Silent Hill) and grotesque moments, including monsters gorging on their victims' eyeballs... yeah.
6,5/10