ake Portman (Asa Butterfield) drifts dolefully through his adolescence, bereft of a sense of purpose. When his beloved grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) is fatally attacked by a vicious creature, the young boy accepts the old man’s dying request for him to seek out a mysterious school for children with special powers. Heading to a remote village in Wales, Jake encounters Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), the guardian of a gang of youths living immortally in a time loop that protects them from harm. As he learns more about Miss Peregrine’s students and their extraordinary abilities – including invisibility, pyrokinesis, and the manipulation of time itself – he begins to fall in love with the charming Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell), and determines to help the group thwart a devilish madman intent on destroying all safe havens for gifted “peculiars.”

A wealth of fascinating ideas abound in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”; but so too does a heap of poorly conceived ones. The concepts that work well are of an exceptional quality, morphing mythological concoctions into breathtaking sequences of magic and action. But the elements that don’t fit seamlessly into the picture tend to distract and detract with plenty of potency. As with many of Tim Burton’s endeavors of late, there are moments that look and feel very much at home in a Tim Burton project, while there are others that get lost in spontaneous explanations and contrivances – as if the source material (the novel by Ransom Riggs) simply required far more minutes than Burton was willing to furnish.

The beginning is enshrouded in unyielding grays and ominous clouds, with black-garbed denizens and wonderfully creepy, dilapidated structures – the aptly dreary locations and set designs for which Burton is so well known and with which he is so clearly comfortable. The visuals work in conjunction with his preference for fleeting normalcy rapidly overtaken by weirdness and morbidity, though Jake’s extremely commonplace teen life (invisibility to girls, an unfulfilling job, disconnectedness from parental figures, and the loss of a loved one right at the outset) would better suit Spielberg’s sensibilities and predilection for youthful protagonists pressured into bouts of extraordinary heroism. Nevertheless, adventure awaits, for which Jake is bravely, independently, ready to tackle. “I’m not a child!” he cries, though his successes with thwarting danger appear more akin to luck than a mature mastery of problem solving or self defense.

Funny mischief and the spectacularly odd Eva Green (far more striking than Burton’s other, regular muses) help to spruce up the tired notion of X-Men-like mutants with superhuman powers and the adolescent fantasy of joining forces with likeminded outcasts against evil forces (as well as romancing an attractive young blonde). Once again, however, problems arise in the lack of definition for supernatural entities, especially when it comes to what the villains can do and how their plot to decimate the peculiars makes any sense whatsoever (along with why they must chatter continuously about their intentions and their superiority, only to stall long enough to be defeated). It also doesn’t help that the plot involves time travel of sorts, or that the narrative makes use of flashbacks, jumps in time, and even flashbacks with jumps in time within them. “Now that you’re all here, there are a few rules…” starts guardian Miss Avocet (Judi Dench), more than halfway through the movie, ignoring the fact that the premise could have been graspable to a greater degree if rules had been laid out at the commencement. Fortunately, some of the earlier sequences are so bewitching that the climax – which can’t surpass the momentum of a mid-movie boat scene that serves as a mere segue, and the conclusion, which is rushed and messy – are somewhat forgivable.

– The Massie Twins