I know I’m going to get pushback that Home Sweet Home Alone is a movie made for kids, so whatever mean thoughts my 42-year-old self might have about it are totally unfounded. And I guess that’s fair. A lot of adults didn’t care for Home Alone when it was released in 1990; I was 10, and I loved it. I might not be the target audience for this remake.
So, before I get into my thoughts about the movie, a brief story. I was supplied a screener link to this from the fine folks at Disney+. My kids love the first Home Alone, so I thought I’d let them watch this new version with me. They were pumped; we made a night of it. I fired up the laptop, cast it to our TV, and we all gathered ‘round.
One hour into the movie, my 6-year-old daughter looked over at me.
“Dad,” she asked. “Can I go to bed?”
Home Alone with a twist
Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t quite a remake, but it also isn’t quite a sequel. It takes place in the same Chicago suburb as the original film and includes a cameo from one original cast member (don’t get too excited, it’s no one you’d hope) but it also feels free to crib whole sequences and lines of dialogue from Chris Columbus’ blockbuster. It attempts to be sweet and moving, but it also wants to bring back the sadistic slapstick that made the first film such a success. It tries everything and succeeds at nothing, winding up a deeply unfunny and distasteful whiff, a series of baffling decisions from a studio that traditionally does brand management better than anyone.
Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell’s screenplay makes an attempt to do something clever by making the film’s villains its main characters. Pam (Ellie Kemper) and Jeff (Rob Delaney) are a suburban couple going through a rough patch as Christmas approaches. Jeff has lost his job and they are in the process of selling their home. When they think a valuable doll has been stolen by young neighbor Max (Jojo Rabbit’s Archie Yates), they decide to go get it back. But unbeknownst to them, Max’s been accidentally left home by himself while his family is on a vacation from Tokyo. When Max overhears the couple talking about “selling the ugly boy” (the doll), he assumes they mean to sell him to human traffickers, so he draws up a battle plan to defend his home.
Lord knows this sixth entry in the franchise needs to shake things up. But its attempts to do something new while marrying it to the appeal of a Home Alone movie makes it a bitter-tasting mess, and director Dan Mazer (um, Dirty Grandpa) doesn’t have the warmth Chris Columbus brought, which papered over a lot of the original’s flaws.
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Overthinking Home Alone
Perhaps you think I’m giving this way too much thought; after all, this is a Home Alone movie. It’s a PG-rated family comedy where a kid bonks robbers on the head. It’s a simple, reliable formula (check out the previous four sequels, though, and you’ll rethink the reliable part of that statement). But I’d argue that the biggest problem of Home Sweet Home Alone is that it over-thinks and overcomplicates the premise, turning what should have been a straightforward and relatively painless take on a flawed but enjoyable family flick into a grating, unfunny and cynical cash grab.
For years, I’ve pondered whether Home Alone is actually a good movie or if it’s just a movie that I have a lot of affection for based on seeing it as a child and rewatching it each Christmas. But over the years, I’ve come around to it being legitimately good. It’s not a masterpiece; its plot depends on a lot of complications and logic gaps just to keep Kevin McAllister at home, and the older I get the more I wonder whether the slapstick siege in its final 10 minutes just set an entire generation up for the Saw movies. But there are enough smart technical and storytelling decisions to elevate it above the rest of the kid movie dreck of the ‘90s that came before and after (including the abysmal Home Alone 2: Lost in New York).
Key is the movie’s simplicity. Sure, there are narrative gymnastics the movie has to navigate just to pull off its premise, but if you dismiss those, Home Alone is pretty straightforward. It’s about a kid who’s a bit of a jerk, and he inadvertently gets his wish to make his family disappear. Left alone, he has to tackle typical childhood fears — the basement furnace, the scary neighbor, life without Mom — and gets to indulge in kiddie wish fulfillment by staying up late, eating junk and watching violent movies. When two robbers show up, he gets to live out a kids’ fantasy of protecting his home from bad guys while also redeeming himself by putting his creative tendencies to practical use.
No filthy animals here
The original’s Harry and Marv may have been dopes, but they were also bad guys, and you can’t discount the real sense of menace Joe Pesci brought to the table, which made it satisfying when they got pelted with paint cans and roasted with blowtorches; Home Alone is a live action cartoon, and the glee of its final act is the same you get when Wile E. Coyote’s Acme products backfire.
Pam and Jeff aren’t bad guys. They’re a nice suburban couple who are trying to save their home. They seem like good, caring parents. We even get a scene where Pam looks around the house they’re trying to keep and remembers all the happy Christmases they had there. Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney are two very funny, very likable actors and, to their credit, they’re the best thing about the movie. But while movies have been built upon nice people stooping to desperation, it’s simply not funny to watch the film’s two most sympathetic characters get bashed, electrocuted, pummeled and roasted for 20 minutes, punctuated by bloody noses, egg-sized forehead welts and lost teeth. Harry and Marv deserved it; throughout Home Sweet Home Alone, I was constantly asking “can’t Pam and Jeff just get a break?”
Perhaps there would be some comedic tension if Max was an awful kid who was getting his just desserts by being left home alone; there’s some of that in the original. But Max isn’t a jerk; he’s a sweet kid who misses his family’s mad dash to the airport because he slept in the garage to avoid the crowded house. Yates is a cute kid, and I enjoyed him in the small doses he was employed in Jojo Rabbit. But there’s not much more to Max than the fact that he can deliver his quips in a British accent (and they aren’t really good quips). He’s just a sweet kid who’s been left alone, quickly realizes how lonely it is, and then thinks two kidnappers have come to get him. The film tries to have two sympathetic leads going to war and they just cancel each other out, leaving this an inert, lifeless mess.
Look what you did, you little jerk
The original Home Alone also gets a lot of mileage off its production design and soundtrack. The use of copious greens and reds give it a sense of warmth and color that lend to the holiday feeling, and John Williams’ score makes it sound more whimsical than it is. Mazer directs this as just another overlit, garish comedy taking place in a sterile community of McMansions where the lights are all white, the homes are gray and nothing feels quite Christmasy (the reds and greens are actually present in Pam and Jeff’s home, further messing with our sympathies).
Max’s family dynamics further exacerbate things. Catherine O’ Hara is key to Home Alone’s success; her trek home to her son is the film’s emotional center, and she somehow makes us understand and like a woman who did the unthinkable. But Max’s mom (Aisling Bea) comes off as cold, always fighting with the other members of the over cramped family. Where Kevin’s mom reckoned with guilt, Max’s blames everyone else. Rather than a cross-country odyssey with standby seating and a polka band, she...spends 10 hours on a flight with someone’s head on her shoulder. And the film rushes through its paces so quickly that I could not understand who the members of Max’s family were, how they were related or why they bothered to rope in such talented people for one or two lines. For the entire film, I thought Pete Holmes was playing Max’s father, which was a bit odd given how much vitriol seems to exist between him and Bea. But no, Max’s father is played by Andy Daly, a very funny actor who waltzes on for two scenes and just as many lines. And I have no idea why Chris Parnell was cast only to appear in one scene walking out to a van; my guess is that’s where his check was located.
And as much as the film likes to pretend it’s Home Alone for a new generation, it’s constantly at pains to remind parents that it’s aware the original exists. There’s a very unfunny riff on the gangster movie played in the first film. Random lines from the first are inserted through the script. A character from the first film shows up just to confirm that, yes, this movie takes place in the same world as that one. And rather than find any new, fun things for Max to do while home alone, the film simply gives us a montage where Yates goes through slightly altered versions of Kevin’s adventures. Well, not counting the weird Scarface homage, for all the kids who love Scarface.
Listen, I’m closing in on a 2,000-word review for a film that probably only deserves 50. And I still can’t figure out why I’m so angry about this movie’s existence. Home Alone is a fine holiday movie, but no masterpiece; and it’s still sitting right there on Disney+. It was already followed by four awful sequels; what’s one more?
And maybe anger is the wrong word for what I’m feeling. I’m baffled. Sure, I’m not surprised that Disney made a cheap play to exploit nostalgia; that is what Disney does. I’m not shocked that it panders to fan’s of the original; again, that’s what Hollywood’s obsession with legacy sequels is all about. Rather, I think I’m stunned that not only did they churn out something so cynical and soulless, they also created something so inert, unpleasant and shrill. The fact that it was released as a big Disney+ Day release only goes to show what the Mouse House truly thinks of its customers.
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