Crossover time…..again?
HOME SWEET HOME ALONE
**
Synopsis:
Max Mercer, a mischievous and resourceful young boy, has been left behind while his family is in Japan for the holidays. So when a married couple attempting to retrieve a priceless heirloom sets their sights on the Mercer family’s home, it is up to Max to protect it from the trespassers, and he will do whatever it takes to keep them out. The reboot promises hilarious hijinks of epic proportions, and despite the absolute chaos, Max eventually comes to realize that there really is no place like home sweet home.
Review:
When it comes to the Home Alone franchise, pretty much anything after 2 we don’t really talk about. Home Alone 3 is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, Home Alone 4 and 5 are just your typical bad direct-to-DVD sequels.
I mean, if we’re being honest, the best Home Alone sequels to come after 2 are this…
and this…
BUT…if we gotta compare Home Alone sequels….I guess Home Sweet Home Alone is the best Home Alone sequel we’ve gotten since Lost In New York……but that’s not saying much at all, this is still not a good movie.
To the film’s credit, they were at least trying to do something a little bit different from the previous direct-to-DVD sequels and try to go back to the basic formula of Home Alone.
I do give Home Sweet Home Alone at least some effort for trying to do something a little bit different by making the “bad guys” only bad because they thought the main kid stole something from them and they were trying to get it back. Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper were actually the strong parts of the movie holding it together. I actually give the film a lot of credit for making the bad guys not the typical bad guys you’d see in a Home Alone movie and making them seem a little more reasonable. They aren’t just the typical small time crooks or international spies or parents to the original burglars or…..whatever the hell they were trying to go for in Home Alone 5.
Archie Yates is passable as the new film’s Kevin McCallister, he was good in Jojo Rabbit and he does have a little bit of charisma to him, he’s a good young actor and I do kind of want to see him in more projects going forward.
But man, do I really hate his family though. I mean, okay, the family is suppose to be a little pushy or mean-spirited to the main character while still being sympathetic and caring when they realized that he’s not with them but in this, my god, this family just sucks, period. First of all, they would blame this kid for no real reason on other peoples’ shit, there is one scene where his mother is talking on the phone and Max is asking for her while all the other kids are running around like maniacs and it’s Max that gets yelled at as if he’s the cause of all the problems in this house. This isn’t like the previous movies where Kevin starts a fight with Buzz over pizza or pushes over a choir during a school recital or even when Alex “prank calls” the police, Max never does anything that warrants this family to be as much of a dick to him than in past film.
Meanwhile, the rest of the kids were the real menaces, the father played by Andy Daly is almost invisible, the uncle played by Pete Holmes is a fucking dick and could give two shits, and the mother, played by Aislina Bea,….by god, she tried, she really did,…but she just couldn’t make it work, you could tell that she was trying to deliver a performance on the level of Catherine O’Hara in the first Home Alone movie but she just can’t do it. Seriously, go back and look at O’Hara’s performance and you can see that she’s giving it her all and acting like a mother who is willing to go to hell and back to get back home to her son. Bea clearly is trying at times but that’s a tough act to follow and she just couldn’t make it work.
The traps as a whole were fine but nothing truly spectacular or hilariously over the top like in the previous films.
To Home Sweet Home Alone’s credit, they at least tried to do something different but in the end, it just doesn’t work all the way through. I at least got some chuckles and again, I liked Delaney and Kemper as well as Yates but everything else was just bland.
It’s better than anything they’ve done after 2 but again, that’s not saying much. I said earlier this year that it was going to be really tough to reboot Home Alone for today as the original worked for the timeperiod it existed in.
But again, I’ll at least give this movie credit that they made a somewhat salvageable sequel out of a franchise that hasn’t produced anything of quality in nearly 30 years so….there’s that, I guess.
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