Film-goers have endured such a punishing onslaught of young adult adaptations, it’s enough to make you want to sulk and dream of escaping into some sort of fantasy realm. Think back, if you can, to recent duds like The Mortal Instruments: City of Bone, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials or, Rowling help us, that second Twilight film, before they wised-up and added a bit of intentional camp. Survivors of this cinematic drudgery (and there ought to be support groups) have been wondering just what would happen if you took one of these wholly by-the-numbers affairs and hired a director who at least had a little bit of style. With Tim Burton behind the camera, and the always-sharp screenwriter Jane Goldman keeping him on course, we have our answer in Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children.  The source material is a whopper of an elevator pitch: X-Men done up all British and gloomy and gothic. (If Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice read comics when she was 13, they’d have been something like this.) To add additional spin, our young English mutants are caught up in a Groundhog Day of their own creation, so we get the playfulness of seeing quirky magic powers mixed with the familiarity of how a time loop plays out. Add in Burton’s authorial visual stamp and what we’ve got is an extremely pleasing formula. It gels as Tim Burton’s best (non-musical) live-action movie for 20 years.  That’s a lot of modifiers for a compliment, but I do want to manage expectations. The plot is extremely predictable and the third act’s action set-pieces, even with a loving homage to Ray Harryhausen, seems to go on forever. Asa Butterfield is quite good as Jake, a nervous dreamer whose voice couldn’t get any lower if it were in his shoes. Out of place in the tacky, palm-tree dotted Florida (Burton’s aesthetic has always mixed in pink flamingo camp with Hammer Films castles) Jake follows the maps left behind by his dead grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp), a Polish refugee who spent the war at the domicile referenced in the film’s title.  Run by Eva Green, who smokes a pipe and looks as if she’s just heard a joke she mustn’t share, the home (on a small island off the coast of Wales) is a safe haven for kids with strange abilities. Some are more standard superhero than others – would you like the ability to be invisible or to manipulate air, or would you like to have bees living in your mouth or the capacity to grow root vegetables with tremendous speed? Jake, with his dad (the always wonderful Chris O’Dowd) visit the island at the suggestion of Jake’s therapist (Allison Janney) and it’s there that he’s able to enter Miss Peregrine’s hidden time loop.  Some of the film’s rules are definitely of the “I’m not going to put too much mental energy to make sure this all checks out,” but I will say there are some innovative uses of time travel. Less interesting is the motivation of the baddies – yes, there are baddies – who want to kill Miss Peregrine for some reason. The creatures, all tentacles and teeth, look tremendous and Samuel L Jackson, perhaps on a dare from Christopher Walken, chomps up the scenery in glorious fashion. It is unfortunate in 2016 that the only person of colour is the bad guy, but at least this is the type of bad guy that the movie is not-that-secretly cheering on. He eats a giant bowl of children’s eyeballs - in Tim Burton’s world that practically makes him a hero.  There are additional books in the series, but I hope they never make it to film. This movie ends on a lovely note (it’s high time Tim Burton visited a pier in Blackpool) and the kids are all at the age where this won’t seem as cute two years from now. Moreover the important themes, one of sanctuary and growth, are nicely (but not overly) developed in this singular entry. Not every film needs to grow into a franchise, sometimes it’s best to let things live in their own isolated world.
That this adaptation is highly stylish is hardly surprising; that it’s quite so charming and funny is. Plus, Samuel L Jackson eats a whole bowl of children’s eyeballs