Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Tim Burton hits rock bottom with this thoroughly misbegotten adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ eponymous novel, as the film, which follows Asa Butterfield’s Jake as he discovers the title domicile and the assortment of quirky, gifted characters that reside within, comes off as an interminable mess that’s too frightening for children and too unfocused and meandering to keep older viewers interested (ie who is the target audience for this disaster, exactly?) Burton’s pervasively lazy approach to the wafer-thin material is in evidence virtually from the minute go, with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children suffering from a shockingly sluggish narrative that’s compounded by an absence of three-dimensional characters and an almost aggressively bland and drab visual sensibility (ie why does the movie look as though it was shot through a screen door?) Jane Goldman’s padded-out, meandering screenplay grows more and more aimless as time slowly progresses, and it’s consequently impossible to work up any interest in Jake’s eventual investigation into the oddball happenings at the title locale. The increasingly frenetic and action-packed bent of the movie’s second half is nothing short of exhausting, with the viewer’s total lack of investment here preventing such moments from generating the thrills and excitement that Burton has undoubtedly intended – which, when coupled with an absolutely endless climax, cements Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children‘s place as a complete disaster from a director who really needs to be put out to pasture.

* out of ****