Movie Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home Is Tim Burton’s Playground

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar  Children

Starring Asa Butterfield, Eva Green

Directed by Tim Burton

You know one of those films that are so bad, they are good? The kind that takes itself so seriously that it forgets how ridiculous it actually is?

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Well, Tim Burton latest–which comes with  a title so long you might as well not memorize it because the film will be gone by the time you do–is so encumbered by its own sense of gravity that it forgets it is at the end of the day, just a children’s fantasy, albeit a dark fantasy.

Miss Peregrine could have been a great deal of fun. The child actors are adorable even when they are made vicious victims of  the over-reaching imagination of the special affects department(one little girl eats with the back of her head).

The elements of tongue-in-cheek drama and shrieking terror are there in the plot. An adolescent boy Jake(Asa Butterfield) gets so carried away by his grandfather’s tall tales that he grows up believing in them and actually sets off in  pursuit of an abandoned orphanage where the grandfather’s imagination takes flight.

Most of the proceedings seem a pretext for panoramic images of rocks, seashores and ocean waters lapping against a location that seems chosen only because  Burton likes desolate resplendence.

As is the wont in Tim Burton’s twistedly terrifying tales the self-mockery as the child’s fears turns on itself, is turned on full throttle. But the narrative is defeated by the slightness of the plot and the insubstantiality of the characters, both inadequacies qualified by a bombastic fairytale atmosphere of narration that mocks at the gently persuasive tone used by Steven Spielberg to propagate a fabled flight.

With its harrowing  images of  precocious peculiarity, captured with radiant cinematic pride  by Bruno Delbonnel, Burton’s film  seems  like a splendid slog. Hugely distinguished actors like Judi Dench and Samuel  L Jackson  show up, assuming postures of selfconscious grandiosity.

This is a film that brings no ambition to its visual spectacle. The plot is  a hefty hogwash with little room for gentle manoeuvre as the narrative swings from one extreme excursive exposition to another. As I sat waiting to be transported neverland, not one redeeming moment cropped up in the lengthy narrative .

Is this the same director who once blended the bizarre and the beautiful so fluently inEdwards Scissorshands?

Burton here seems content reposing in the land of the bland . This is Edwards without the scissors. Even Eva Green’s stately performance and Rupert Everett’s cameo as a snoopy bird-watcher  cannot rescue this film from falling into a wretched murky grave.