Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children

Everyone has a special talent. By everyone, I mean everyone, even me. That’s not the point of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The movie, like most hot turds, doesn’t have a point; it’s just a steaming pile of hot shit crapped out of the massive asshole that is Hollywood. Actually, the only turds with points are the ones after you eat Corn Nuts for an entire meal, which is only like maybe half of mine because the nurse at the urgent care said I would die of internal bleeding if I kept at it. 

The message about special talents is all mine. For some of us it might be something simple like the ability to die early, or die easily. Maybe it’s how nicely you fold t-shirts. Maybe you don’t see the special talent in yourself or others, but that’s just because it has yet to be discovered. 

You see, the value is not in how special your talent is, it’s how early in life you can tap into it. Once discovered and exploited, a talent can make you an interesting person. I guarantee a teenager who ties a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue will get laid more often than some dude who doesn’t find out until he’s 80 that he can melt steel with his mind.

When I was a teenager, I was pretty fucking sure my special talent was my ability to keep a live rat on my shoulder. I later learned four things: 1) that is not a special talent because anyone who rubs liver all over their trench coat can do it; 2) girls are not nearly as impressed by a pet rat as I am, which is obviously a gender flaw; 3) I probably should have dressed up Mr. Whiskers in little costumes. Then chicks would have known I was cool; and 4) it won’t change a girl’s mind if, when you introduce yourself, you explain that the rat is not part of your lovemaking process, unless she wants it to be, in which case, you’ll have to sedate the rodent so you can roll a condom over it.

I still don’t know what my special talent is, and I’ve carried a lot of fucking rats on a lot of my body parts. I have the bite scars to prove it. I just hope whatever it is doesn’t make me as big a fucking tool as Jake (Asa Butterfield), the dullard at the heart of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The movie is based on a trilogy of high-concept, shit-written young adult novels that, like all young adult novels, trucks in the formula of selling teenage girls dreamy boys and the notion that the most boring and picked-on kids are really the most specialest of all. 

In the magical-stupidism of YA, the scrawniest kids turn into werewolves or glittering demons or girls with magical powers, all of which are used to put bullies in their place. In other words, teen novels adequately prepare kids for a world that does not and never will exist. They are meant solely to withdraw cash from the infirmed and pimple-faced while the authors crank out a few more books and cal the crap trilogies. The rational teen knows he will never stumble upon some special talent that makes him invincible, and so instead of novels he buys a rat and starts experimenting.

Miss Peregrine is a cynical variation on a predictable YA formula. In fact, it’s essentially just a version of X-Men with pretension. A group of misfit kids with superpowers are sheltered by an adult from villainous outside forces. In this case, the kids are hidden in a time loop from eyeball-eating bad guys. The time loop in the movie is during WWII and, of course, on the wuthering moors of Wales. All scenic and romantic.

The hero Jake doesn’t know he’s a peculiar child. He travels from modern-day Florida to Wales based on some vague information his grandfather provides. He is accompanied by his father (a criminally underused and miscast Chris O’Dowd), who is utterly useless to moving the story or to making it more entertaining. In fact, the movie would be a fuck lot better without the dad because then there wouldn ot be so many lose threads.

In almost no time in Wales, Jake does what grown up bad guys could not do for decades. That is, find Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) and her home in its time loop from 1943. There he meets a bunch of other young people who have special talents but very little personality. One has teeth in the back of her head, one can float, and another can vivify inanimate objects.

From there, the movie veers into an incomprehensible and boring-as-fuck mess. I tried to understand what the fuck was going on for a while, but found it mostly not worth the effort. There are fighting skeletons (a misplaced nod, I guess, to Ray Harryhausen), a sunken cruise ship, birds, derelict amusement parks, illogical leaps in time, Samuel L. Jackson as a mad scientist collecting eyeballs, a misfire of a romantic subplot and a hell of a whole lot of the story’s hero standing around and watching.

Director Tim Burton is interested in visual peculiarities but not much in people. Jake’s character is a study in how not to write a hero. Jake isn’t involved hardly at all. He is a spectator for most of the movie, giving an audience little reason to give a fuck. Finally, as any audience could have predicted, he discovers he too has a peculiarity, only it’s extremely specific and not much to write home about.

Burton’s graphics are hit and miss, but at no time is this movie dazzling. It feels like the ambitions of someone with a gravely diminished imagination. Like a tired five-year-old making up a ghost story on the fly. The peculiar kids are a low-rent freak show. Each is odd in a way that distracts for a few seconds, but then you want to move on before they make eye contact with you. Some scenes, such as those where baddies eat eyeballs and a battle at an amusement park, are embarrassingly cheap-looking. Like they should be on Syfy at midnight and have Rutger Hauer in them.

Jackson is misused here because his character is such a stereotypical bad guy. It’s like after reading the script, the makers decided the only way to inject any soul into the story would be by asking Jackson to do all the lifting. Green is also misused because we don’t see her tits, and without those, she’s really just a big fat ham and cheese sandwich. Judi Dench also makes an appearance, but fuck if I know why.

Going back to everyone having a special talent, and discovering them. I believe we will all discover ours. Let’s just hope that we aren’t like Tim Burton and lose ours. Because then we’ll just be pretending while the magic has long gone. Two Fingers for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.