After he is bullied by some mean kids, 16-year old drugstore employee Jake (Asa Butterfield) received a telephone call from his raging, delusional grandpa, Abe Portman (Terence Stamp).
His deadbeat father, who doesn't have a job, can't get off work, so his boss drives him over.
It's mid-afternoon when they leave but the middle of the night when they arrive, although in other scenes Abe lives close enough for Jake to bicycle over.
Have you had enough inconsistencies yet? Good-- we're just getting started.
They find Grandpa dead, with his eyes gouged out. But he lives long enough to tell Jake to go to the Home.
Flashback to Grandpa babysitting the 5- and 10-year old Jake, and telling him about his childhood. He lived in Poland before World War II, where there were "monsters" about, so his parents sent him to
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, on an island off the coast of Wales, where he would be safe.
Ok, I get it. Grandpa was
Jewish. Repeat:
Jewish. It's a perfectly legitimate word. Why is everyone afraid to say it?
The Peculiar Children all had bizarro powers:
1. Emma was lighter than air.
2. Olive could start fires by touching things.
3. Fiona could make plants grow.
4. Millard was invisible.
5. Hugh (Milo Parker, left) was full of bees.
6. Horace (Hayden Keeler-Stone, below) could project his dreams onto a screen, like a movie (how did he ever discover that one?).
Abe left the home in 1941 to join the army, but he stayed in contact with the Headmistress, Miss Peregrine.
Back to the present: Jake tells the whole story to his therapist, who suggest that the Peculiar Children were actually mentally ill or physically disabled or something. Since Miss Peregrine is still alive -- she would be well over 100 -- why not pop over to Wales and check?
So Jake and his dimwitted loser Dad drop everything and fly to a tiny village in Wales, where Dad pays some local boys to hang out with the mortified teenager. They take him to the Home, in ruins since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1941.
Why would the Nazis bomb a children's home in a tiny town in Wales?
By the way, Dad (Chris O'Dowd) is writing a book on birds, and the tiny town has some interesting specimens. We get the idea that the bird book is a pipe dream, something he is writing endlessly but will never finish.
He's also amazingly neglectful: "I see that something is troubling you. If you want to talk about it, call your therapist. I'm busy."
No wonder Jake later drops out of the family without a moment's hesitation.
Back to the House: somehow Jake takes a step to the right, and the Home is still there, with Miss Peregrine and the children the same age as they were in 1941 After some shenanigans and missteps, they explain: they're in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over. Every night, just as the bomb falls, Miss Peregrine resets time 24 hours.
And there are similar time loops all over the world, where other Peculiar Children are kept safe from monsters by reliving the same day over and over.
These time loops are presented as marvelous paradises, but can you imagine how horrible it would be to live 70 years with the same 11 people, never growing up, no movies, no tv, nothing to do all day, every day? They don't even take classes. They play, eat giant carrots for dinner, watch Hugh's dreams on a movie screen (here's hoping he doesn't have an erotic dream), and then go outside to watch Miss Peregrine reset time as the bombs fall.
And there are monsters, eyeless creepy things who are trying to regain their humanity by eating the eyes of Peculiar Children. I think.
It's all completely muddled and nonsensical, a mishmash of Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, H. P. Lovecraft, and nonsense. Plus two -- count 'em -- two hetero romances.
1. The morose teenage Enoch, who hates Jake on sight, finally gets the gumption (after 70 years) to tell Olive that he is in love with her. They walk off hand in hand.
2. Jake falls for Emma, his grandfather's girlfriend. After the adventure is over and the eyeless monsters subdued, Grandpa Abe (alive again for some reason) tells him "Go to her." So the 16-year old drops everything, including school and his parents, and rushes to the ship and kisses her.
Oh, I forgot. The Peculiar Children raise the Titanic or something.
I don't know what was more annoying, the incessant heterosexism or the fact that the MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE.
By the way, the top photo is the hunky Bryson Powers, who is listed in the credits as "Surfer Boy." I don't remember anyone surfing in the movie.
He's a Canadian actor, born on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1974, and a big Cape Breton booster although he now lives in Toronto. He has 61 film credits. Some of the more interesting are:
