There’s a spectacular sequence on the Ghost Train at Brighton Pier at what should be the climax of Tim Burton’s latest fantasy, MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN. Watch out for the director as a wide eyed and terrified rider before the sequence segues into a Ray Harryhausen homage with the skeleton crew of a sunken shipwreck.
Based on the book of the same name by Ransom Riggs, the first in a trilogy, the film version of MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN is scripted by Jane Goldman, a dab hand at fantasy with the splendid and underrated Stardust, as well as The Woman in Black, Kick Ass and X Men: First Class. Indeed, the peculiar children who live at Miss Peregrine’s are very much like juvenile X men, possessing peculiar properties of preternatural power like proficiency in pyrotechnics.
Indeed, it is the flame haired Olive, who can spontaneously combust, who fires up the screen every time she graces the screen, thanks to the incandescent presence of Lauren McCrostie.
She is far more fiery than the literally feisty, Emma, who has the ability to manipulate air, and manipulate the feelings of males, too. Inexplicably, this windbag woos three male protagonists in the picture, somehow blinding them to the combustible comforts of Olive.
Scary, but not scary enough, MISS PEREGRINE’s HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN is Harry Potter meets Mary Poppins perhaps?
This movie re-teams Burton with Eva Green, arguably the best feature of the director’s Dark Shadows, as the titular crossbow-wielding, pipe-smoking headmistress. She is a Ymbryne, an entity pledged to take care of peculiars; to hide them from “the world’s dangers” by creating stable time loops that can only be accessed by other peculiars to provide temporal isolation from the rest of the world. As her name suggests, she can morph into a peregrine falcon.
The antagonists to the Peculiars are the Hollowgasts, rogue mutating ex-Peculiars, who peck the pupils out of the Peculiars, devouring their windows to the soul.
Samuel L Jackson is delegated duty to lead these eye eating terrors, turning up to spoil the party of Peregrine’s Welsh rare bit of land. Talk about cheese! Sam Jackson playing a shock zombie out of some Val Guest voodoo vibe.
MISS PREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN boasts a terrific supporting cast, including the venerable talents of Terence Stamp and Judi Dench, and has enough high water marks before it sinks into saccharine.