Review of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) by Thequietgamer — 03 Mar 2017

Personally, I'm not really a big Tim Burton fan. However this movie is something I found to be quite different from the director's previous works. Burton's visual style can be found throughout. The movie is just very different in tone from his previous works.

The X-Men comparisons aren't unfair. In fact they're practically unavoidable. The concept mirrors Marvel's long-running comic series in a plethora of ways and just throws in a time-travel angle and instead of mutants the kids are called "Peculiars." They're also much less heroic. At least in terms of human affairs.

If perhaps FOX's X-Men movies aren't something you feel comfortable introducing to your kids right now, Miss Peregrine might have a team that you'll find more suitable. With the exception of some surprisingly strong and definitely unnecessary profanity in one scene it's a fairly kid-friendly movie. It also happens to avoid having that usual Burton darkness. It's actually surprising how cartoonish things get. It gets to the point where all the tension is sucked out of everything. While I found this made the movie more enjoyable than I've found previous Burton movies to be, it does end up hurting things in the end. The whole thing ends up feeling formulaic and play safe. It might have actually benefited from some of Burton's usual gothic edginess. At least we get a fantastic performance from Samuel L. Jackson out of it. As like with many movies in his career, Jackson is a real scene stealer and absolutely delightful to watch.

Burton's visual panache make for an attractive movie. The source material proves to add some extra life to the mix, but yet things still fall short and it's not quite clear where and why. It could definitely use things like more fleshed out characters, but at the very least we get an imaginative assortment of powers and creatures brought to life onscreen. At the end of the day things aren't all that satisfying, but it's a decent attempt at making a more kid-friendly X-Men movie for the big screen.