Review: MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Thoda New, Thoda Deja Vu

2 stars

Mini Review:

Tim Burton’s fans have always enjoyed the spectacle of his vision and this movie is a visual feast. Trouble is, you cannot get rid of a niggling feeling that you’ve seen this somewhere before…It’s a time travel thing, I suppose.

Main Review:

Eva Green is gorgeous as Miss Peregrine who is in charge of taking care of peculiar children. A bit like Professor Xavier, but these children are stuck inside a time loop. We discover this with the help of Jake (Asa Butterfield), a young boy whose disinterested dad (Chris O’Dowd) brings him to the island…

You’ve seen the talented mutants in X- Men and you come to know and like them. Rogue and Iceman’s little skating piece in the moonlight is just as fascinating as the Kurt Wagner’s abilities to teleport himself. You remember their nicknames as well as their given names. That’s because their backstories are well established in the movie as well as in the comic books. Here, we only know someone’s lighter than a feather and some other person is invisible and so on, but it does not generate interest, and you don’t know whether the nakedness of the invisible boy is meant to be funny or alarming.

The special effects are a visual treat. The seeds that grow instantly into a vine was fun to watch. And so are the antics of the little girl who has exceptional strength. But what is her name? How did her parents discover her ‘peculiar-ness’? It would have been great to know. But it was all bogged down by the fact that the story is set in 1943 and they needed to take care of creating a whole set as well as clothing and so on and these backstories would get in the way.

We know also why Eric became Magneto. And even though his life goals are evil, you have a certain empathy for the evil characters. Then why don’t we have any for Samuel L Jackson’s character? He comes across as just someone bad. And yes, if you’ve seen Terminator, the arm turning into weapon effect is so much like Robert Patrick’s T1000 in Judgement Day, you are not alarmed. Even the Hollow Monsters seem to be familiar.

The film fails to engage simply because it wants to say too many things about Jake, his grandfather, his relationship with his dad, the peculiars, Miss Peregrine, war, loneliness, the science fiction part about time in a loop, Jake’s sudden attraction for the floating girl, Judy Dench in a sudden appearance and callous disappearance, period costumes, the creepy boy who reminds you of Sid from Toy Story… And nothing satisfies.



(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)