There’s much in the novels by Ransom Riggs that seems tailor made for Tim Burton’s cheerfully macabre sensibility, and Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children arrives on the silver screen like an X-Men comic drawn by Edward Gorey. Viewers familiar with such movies as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Dark Shadows will recognise Burton’s handiwork here; Miss Peregrine is, in visual terms, a world away from the sterile CGI of his lesser movies, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and particularly 2010’s Alice In Wonderland, which felt like the work of a filmmaker going through the motions. What follows is a fairly typical Hero’s Journey-type adventure, with Jake the newcomer among a coterie of odd characters which also includes an invisible boy and identical twins who wear cloth masks. Then there’s Miss Peregrine herself, who can turn into, well, a peregrine. Gradually, Jake learns more about the history of the orphanage and his grandfather’s life there, and soon finds a kindred spirit in Emma (Ella Purnell), a girl who has to wear lead boots to prevent her from floating into the ether. After a slow start in a studiously drab Florida, the movie finds its momentum when Jake arrives at Miss Peregrine’s orphanage. Burton clearly loves the characters Jake finds there, and revels in such odd reveals as a cute Hollywood-style moppet with a ravenous hidden side, or the brief yet unsettling fights between the creatures the boy in the attic creates (Enoch, played by Finlay MacMillan), which recall the stop-motion work of the Quay brothers. Burton seems to run out of creative steam in the third act, which switches location and makes a stab at some superhero-lite action sequences. Film buffs will note the passing nods to Ray Harryhausen in some of the special effects, but the final third feels oddly flat and disjointed, as though the action was foisted on a director who just wanted to make a romantic horror comedy. Indeed, at well over two hours, Miss Peregrine is glaringly overlong, and hardly helped by an exposition-heavy performance from Samuel L Jackson, which is fun at first but soon outstays its welcome. (Some odd narrative jumps might even hint at some late reshoots here.) Despite all this, Burton’s Miss Peregrine is too good-natured to dismiss entirely. Younger viewers may enjoy the movie’s flashes of imagination and Doctor Who-esque moments of fright. Older movie-goers, meanwhile, will appreciate the bits where Burton displays some of the guileless anarchy that lit up such films as Batman Returns or Frankenweenie. Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is out in UK cinemas on the 29th September.
