'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children': Tim Burton's latest tries way too hard

We've come to expect a great deal from Tim Burton.

Art-house geeks are forever on the lookout for the fabulous fabulist to craft another one of his dark, slightly perverse fairy tales like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Multiplex owners clamor for the big moneymakers - Batman ($411 million in global ticket sales), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ($475 million), and the mother of all Burton fairy-tale-blockbusters, Alice in Wonderland ($1.04 billion).

Burton's Lewis Carroll adaptation was both things at once: a sharp-edged, mind-blowing fable and a crowd-pleaser that has created an even greater expectation.

Burton's latest, the 3D fantasy adventure Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children tries - far too hard - to replicate the Alice effect and falls short.

Adapted from Ransom Riggs' 2011 novel published by Philadelphia's Quirk Books, the PG-13 fantasy adventure for tweens is a scary yarn about a group of seriously odd teens with magical powers who are rejected by normal society.

While the premise seems made for Burton's more arty followers, the star-studded picture, featuring Eva Green, Rupert Everett, Samuel L. Jackson, and Judi Dench, is stuffed with so many aggressively blockbuster-ian, Pirates of the Caribbean-like action scenes that it ends up undercutting its darker impulses.

Who knows, the picture might end up making a mint at the box office, but I fear Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is too uneven, too self-consciously cool to succeed either as art or as mass spectacle.

British thesp Asa Butterfield (Ender's Game) stars as Jacob, a gangly high school misfit whose parents (Chris O'Dowd and Kim Dickens) have such horribly beige personalities. Jacob has always been more drawn to his paternal grandfather, Abraham (the mighty Terence Stamp), a raconteur who regales him with fantastical tales about his adventures as a member of the Peculiars, a group of gifted children who never grow up and who are cared for at secret locations by birdwomen, including Miss Peregrine (Green).

A more British, literary version of the X-Men, the kids can light fires by touch, turn invisible, or spit out bees. Thing is, they're being hunted by these awful shape-shifting monsters led by a mad murderous scientist (Jackson).

The timid Jacob (he's so passive and such a scaredy-cat, it can be trying to watch) learns to channel his inner man when he falls in with the Peculiars and in love with their most graceful member, the dreamy, levitating Emma (Ella Purnell, Never Let Me Go).

Their romance is genuinely touching and charming, but seriously underdeveloped.

To Burton's credit, he infuses the film with a rich palette of colors and emotions, whipping up a gorgeous magical world around his vivid, fascinating characters.

While there's a lot to love about Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children, the film loses itself midway when it switches into an action story.

Burton pits his heroes against the monsters in an increasingly tedious series of dangerous encounters. The fight sequences feel forced, and the villains are too broad, too cartoonish to fit with the rest of the film's well-drawn personalities. (I kept expecting Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle to drop in.)

Jackson especially is out of place here as an ostentatious, sartorially challenged villain who would be more at home in a James Bond picture.

We've seen all this before, and no amount of fabulous Burtonian decoration can save the action sequences from being predictable, even dull. In other words, they're like the set pieces in every other blockbuster.

Come back to the art house, Mr. Burton. We miss you terribly.

tirdad@phillynews.com

215-854-2736

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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2 1/2 (Out of four stars)

Directed by Tim Burton. Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Judi Dench, Rupert Everett. Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.

Running time: 2 hours, 7 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril).

Playing at: Area theaters.EndText