Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and all the images you see in this review are owned by 20th Century Fox
Directed by Tim Burton
I mean… if we’re still gonna get YA films THIS late into the game; at least we’ve got an ACTUAL director behind it unlike say… The 5th Wave which, as far as I can tell, was directed by the Film-O-Tron 9000. Still, the real life director they got here happens to be one that’s been on a downward slide for quite some time now, so while this looks like the perfect film for him to make, the circumstances don’t inspire a lot of confidence. Does Burton manage to shake off his slump with this adaptation of a book that apparently a lot of people have read, or will this come and go like so many other films in this over saturated genre? Let’s find out!!
The movie is all about Jake (Asa Butterfield) who’s living his boring everyday life in boring everyday Florida where things that are boring happen every day. That is… until the incident! One day he arrives at his Grandpa’s place and finds that he’s been dragged out into the woods and had his eyes gouged out by something. The police think it was dogs, but Jake saw something out there in those woods, and it wasn’t a dog! Not even Cujo is THAT precise with his killings! Anyway, Jake finds some information in a book his grandfather gave him that points to a bunch of stories he was told as a kid about peculiar children living in a home in some English village, and he feels that he should go there to see if the stories were true. If nothing else, it might give a bit of closure for him which convinces his dad to begrudgingly take him, out there. Naturally his dad is a bit of dip shit and loses track of Jake almost immediately. Well… it’s not ENTIRELY his fault considering the island has some sort of dimensional time portal or something… I don’t know. Just think of it like that scene in James and the Giant Peach where he crawls into the peach and turns into a stop motion character. On the other side of this portal thingy, he finds the children from his grandfather’s stories as well as Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) who watches over them and is chock full of information that she’ll doll out to Jake throughout the course of the film involving his grandfather, their time portal thingy, and the bad guys chasing them led by Mr. Barron (Samuel L Jackson). Will Jake find a new lease on life and be able to work through the grief of his grandfather’s death by spending time with these Peculiar kids? What does Mr. Barron plan to do if he ever finds out where Miss Peregrine is hiding all these kids? What the heck do they do all day in this little pocket dimension anyway?
“After dinner, we’ll play charades!” “We’ve been doing that for the last seventy fucking years!” “Hey! Watch your language!” “WHY SHOULD I!? I’M AN OCTOGENARIAN FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!” “Huh. Was Jesus a Peculiar like us? I mean, he COULD walk on water.”
