There’s this odd duality that percolates throughout Tim Burton’s latest filmic venture Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. At almost any given time, it is either extremely lively or extremely dull. Look no further than its charisma-hole of a lead, Asa Butterfield (Hugo) for the dullness. He slums through scenes; a wet blanket personified. Flat as a rock, he delivers each goopy line with monotonous apathy, casting a sleeping spell on the enchantment Burton tries (and is sometimes able) to conjure. Moving as if yanked by an invisible chain, he is a blight on an otherwise solidly entertaining feature courtesy of a director who himself has recently unchained himself from his greatest liability (*cough, Johnny Depp, cough*.)

Samuel L. Jackson as a toothy hollowgast – a lanky monster invisible to humans that feasts on eyeballs – is the life of the party. Zany and clearing having a grand ol’ time, Sam Jackson represents all the batshit loony elements that Burton gets right with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. A scene depicting the aforementioned eye munching – with a powder-faced crew of old-timers maliciously crowding into the frame to slurp up a bowl overflowing with slimy eyeballs – is delightfully obscene. Almost an Are You Afraid of the Dark riff on Guillermo del Toro’s Pale Man, this is cinema intended for children that will likely scar them for many sleepless nights to come. When Burton correctly measures the tongue in cheek elements like he does in these moment, he hits the bullseye. When he misses, well, that’s another story.

Burton’s affinity for the occult has taken many shapes and sizes over the years. His once renowned dark vision has mainstreamed over the years with Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands giving way to the likes of Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows. He recaptured a bit of the magic a few years back with his stop-motion Frankenweenie before trying (and mostly failing) to do something completely out of his wheelhouse with Big Eyes. And at the very least Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children seems like a step in the right direction for the nightmare-obsessed filmmaker. A step towards balancing the bizarre with a genuinely emotional undercurrent without alienating the audience with phoned-in, whackadoo Johnny Depp characters. He doesn’t get it quite right – especially the emotionality which is kind of all over the place here – but at least it’s a good measure more down to earth than some other efforts and a good bit more fun.

It all starts with Jake, an ordinary boy with few other qualities aside from his ordinariness. Due to his boring demeanor, Jake has few friends save for his grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) who assails Jake nightly with tall tales about his past as a globe-trotting monster hunter. When Abe is attacked by an otherworldly beast one night, Jake and his bumbling wanna-be-bird-author father (Chris O’Dowd trying on a proper American accent) hunt for answers on a small island off the coast of Wales where Abe claims to have been schooled by a benevolent mistress called Miss Peregrine (Eva Green).

According to Abe’s tales, Miss Peregrine, herself a powerful entity able to transform into a bird and control time, took in “peculiar” children from around the world – including those with extraordinary strength, mouths where their skulls should be, and some with the (poorly defined) power to manipulate the air itself – and allowed them a place to exist in peace away from the normalcy of the world as well as the hollowgasts who hunt them. It will surprise few that the adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ debut novel, the first of three, is penned by Jane Goldman. Goldman is a Matthew Vaughn regular and takes credit for working on a number of X-Men films (First Class, Days of Future Past) as well as Kingsman: The Secret Service, Kick-Ass and Stardust. All of her titles share a similar youthful, team-building quality and though the characters within Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children are never privy to the same amount of backstory and mythology as some of those other efforts, the similarities are fairly blatant. The double-edge sword being that though Miss Peregrine’s seems redundant and borrowed, it is also likely to entertain those who enjoyed the aforementioned efforts.

While the X-Men series (the latest clunker aside) has a far greater grasp of its characters and the relationships shared between them, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, especially as a potential franchise starter, discovers some interesting elements along the way – darkly creature design, impressive VFX, a mostly interesting cast of characters, intriguing and fun time-travel aspects – while leaving enough open-endedness to prove intriguing if it carries on past this first effort. Others however – such as the familial relationships, most notably Jake and his dad, the swing-and-miss pacing and an uninvolving romantic angle between the perpetually flatlining Jake and his gravity-disregarding boo – seem shortchanged and largely ineffective. Burton’s keen eye for imaginative landscapes though lends Peregrine’s some much-needed visual pop while some of the big set pieces remain inexplicably humdrum. A weird soundtrack composed by Matthew Margetson and Michael Higham fails to amplify the action almost entirely and work only to suck the energy from the room. That said, when the collection of peculiar children finally unleash their powers on the hollowgasts and that zany Sam Jackson, Burton balances the laughs with the thrills and really manages to invest us in the pure popcorn value of what he has created.

While Butterfield remains everything the film strives not to be – monotonous, dull, ordinary; like his romantic counterpart (Ella Purnell), he sinks as if affixed with iron boots – the remainder of the feature is an uneven balance of great wins and shruggable losses that ultimately adds up to a curious, if not entirely necessary, addition to Burton’s increasingly strange filmography.

CONCLUSION: As a sort of X-Men with prepubescents, ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ is an often clunky, occasionally awesome slice of Tim Burton weirdness. With strong adult leads (Eva Green, Sam Jackson), a healthy number of chuckles and Grimm-like visual flair working in its favor and a flaccid child star (Asa Butterfield) and a burdensome script working against it, Burton’s latest mostly lives up to “peculiar” part of its title without ever daring to be extraordinary.