Tim Burton is a filmmaker whose reputation has slipped a bit over the years. His arrival with Beetlejuice and Pee Wees Big Adventure saw a particular creative vision, with lightness of touch, eccentricity, and the best animator-sensibility-turned-to-live-action since Frank Tashlin. But he's been slipping by in recent years, and hasn't had what I'd call a good movie in almost a decade (I liked 2007's "Sweeney Todd"), and has regularly had problems with middling or inept scripts, an overindulgence towards Johnny Depp and a general sense that he was more into style over substance.
Alas, for me, anyway, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" isn't really a return to form - except that in this case, Burton feels peculiarly trapped by his screenplay and by some of his casting. THere are a couple of sequences near the end where the impulsive whimsical Burton breaks free, and they're fine, but for a lot of its length there's quite laborious exposition and a framing device seeing a character from "The Real World" entering into a fantastic world of strange children with powers and magic and wonder. And for me, the film really didn't need all the fart-arsing around with a real world, which never got particularly engaging.
A lot of very good actors are quite under-used - Eva Green as the titular Miss Peregrine spends a lot of time expositioning, quite charmingly but with no real active characterisation until suddenly the plot kicks in and she's marginalised, Judi Dench similarly gets marginalised very quickly, as do Alison Janney and Rupert Everett. Chris O'Dowd is completely wasted as the lead's very dull father. Samuel L. Jackson gets a bit more to play with as the bad guy (although he still takes until two thirds of the movie to enter) - still, he eats scenery nicely.
All in all, it's a bit of a disappointment.
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