Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Review

I'm not a big Tim Burton fan. I really, really like Alice in Wonderland, but I can't stand Edward Scissorhands. So when I saw the trailer for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, I thought it looked like Tim Burton saw X-Men and thought "I can make a movie like that." It's even made by Fox, the same company that made X-Men. (they should have done the X-Men themed Fox title). So I didn't have very high expectations.

"What did you think?" I really don't think this movie is very good. I don't recommend seeing it in theaters. I left the movie thinking "okay?..........." I really don't get the point of this movie. The adventure that this movie has is really boring and so unspectacular. There are a lot of scenes that were just plain stupid in my opinion. Some scenes felt like I was supposed to be impressed by, but I just was bored. If you've enjoyed Tim Burton's movies in the past I would suggest maybe you should give this a try. I would strongly suggest not bringing kids who get scared easily to this movie. I really don't have a lot of good things to say about this movie. It does have that British proper "Mary Poppins" type warm tone. There are a couple of fun characters that have some screen time. The production design is pretty great. Eva Green plays Miss Peregrine. She, in my opinion, was the best actress in the entire movie. I thought she was awesome as Miss Peregrine. I thought her character needed a lot more screen time. She was barely a part of the adventure. She does remind me of proper British characters like Mary Poppins. I think that's all the good I have to say. 

Let me begin my huge list of complaints. This movie does something that I hate the most about a lot of movies today. When it's a fantasy world with a normal person in it, they do stupid things like take a selfie with one of the characters in the fantasy world. There's an action scene in the middle of a 2016 amusement park with modern day music. I HATE being reminded of the time I live in with fantasy films. Asa Butterfield played the main character named Jack. I thought Asa Butterfield did not do a very good job as an actor at all. There were a lot of lines he delivered very badly. Some lines somehow he delivered in a way that made it look like he had a voiceover. I thought Jake was a very boring character. We follow him for a lot of the movie, but he's a normal guy. In this fantasy world, we're going to follow the guy who's normal. 

Something that Tim Burton has always sucked at, in my opinion is making good side characters. Jake's father is so fake. There's a scene with a very young Jake and he says he want's to be an explorer. His father replies "Everything's already been discovered," while he watches football. They arrive at a hotel and he says "I hope there's bourbon." There's another scene where Jake is trying to find the home but his father says he has to stay at the hotel and work and that Jake can't go alone. So the father actually finds these random kids and pays them to walk with him. Because yeah, you can trust random street kids to protect your kid.

There were a lot of bad side actors. One of the peculiar children was a real jerk and he really annoyed me. This movie made maybe 5 jokes. Maybe 2 of them I chuckled at. There was some bad CGI. Some action scenes dragged on. Some really bad dialog. There was a really bad exposition scene towards the end. Tim Burton could have made the peculiar children characters so much more interesting. I didn't feel like the children were a family. I should have cared about Jake and these kids. Most of the children's peculiarities weren't very interesting and the ones that were interesting weren't used in a very interesting way. 

The movie has some really bad editing. It reminded me of Peter Jackson's movie editing. It's just plain lazy. One scene in King Kong has someone throwing a hat into the air and instead of showing the hat landing on their head, it cuts after the hat has already landed on the persons head so they can get away without having to actually catch the hat. There's a random scene with violent stop-motion creepy Frankenstein babies. The cinematography was really weird and cliché sometimes. Some characters were really dumb. It has that weird Tim Burton "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" type music that I think is really dumb. A lot of stupid jokes that aren't funny, like some kids rapping. It's like Tim Burton doesn't know what normal people are actually like at all. There was a few things that reminded me a lot of X-Men in a negative way. Jake would be a very boring normal guy version of The Wolverine. The kids get in trouble whenever they do something that draws attention to the public. Miss Peregrine would be Professor X. Miss Peregrine made this home for them because they weren't liked in society. The peculiar children would be the mutants. They even call their powers their "Peculiarity" instead of "Mutation".

Tim Burton really did not impress me at all here. Again, if you've enjoyed Tim Burton's movies in the past I would suggest maybe you should give this a try. I would strongly suggest not bringing kids who get scared easily to this movie. There are scenes with tentacles going into people's eyes and people feasting on children's eyeballs. I don't hate this movie, there's just not a lot of good which makes it sound like I hated it. I kind of enjoyed it, but there were a ton of problems. I don't recommend Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children in theaters. Just wait to rent it from Netflix or iTunes.

........Where was Johnny Depp?