Written by Jane Goldman.
Directed by Tim Burton.
★★★
Some actors should just not be forced to try an American accent, and Chris O'Dowd is one such actor. The Irish actor best known for the BBC comedy The IT Crowd makes Ewan McGregor sound like Robert Redford. But that aside he plays Franklin, father of Jake (Asa Butterfield, a Londoner who's slightly more successful at sounding like a native Yank.)
Jake is on a quest. After his grandfather dies, Jake follows a set of clues to find Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine is the subject of bedtime stories his grandfather would tell him, but he confides that the stories are true. Jake convinces his father to take him to a small island off of Wales, where Miss Peregrine's house is supposedly hidden.
He finds it, and it's a house in the middle of a magic cave. The house is stuck in a time loop from 1943, and in this house live all sorts of peculiar children. One boy is invisible. One girl has a mouth on the back of her neck. And so on.
But there are another set of mutant peculiars who are hunting them. These are a menacing breed led by Barron (Samuel L. Jackson). The design of the mutants is where you can really tell this is a Tim Burton film.
The movie is breezy and enjoyable. Eva Green tends to be great in everything, and she's darkly bewitching here as Miss Peregrine. Like many Burton films, the ending isn't great. In fact, it gets quite convoluted with jumping from time loop to time loop. I lost track trying to make sense of it.
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