Home Sweet Home Alone

 

When it was initially announced that they were re-booting Home Alone I was a bit apprehensive. Hasn't this film series basically been done to death by this point with just re-hashing the same plot over and over again? Even Macaulay Culkin bowed out after the second one and really there was no more story left to tell. Still, this one is starring the adorable Archie Yates, who I loved in Jojo Rabbit, so I went in with an open mind. What followed only proved by initial fears. 

Jeff and Pam McKenzie (played by Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper) are experiencing financial hardship and are putting their house on the market since Jeff is out of work and they can no longer afford it on Pam's salary alone. Crashing their open house is the mischevious tyke Max Mercer (played by Archie Yates) and his mom Carol (played by Aisling Bea) so Max can use the rest room. While there, Max briefly discusses a box on antique dolls Jeff finds in the closet and Carol mentions those can be worth a lot of money, especially one that was mistakenly produced with the face upside down. When Jeff realizes the doll is missing later, he believes that Max had stolen it. After a search on eBay and realizing similar dolls are going for $200,000 and more, Jeff and Pam set out to retrieve the doll. Meanwhile, Max's house is besieged by relatives on the eve of everyone departing for Tokyo for the holiday. To escape the madness, Max finds solace in the garage as he climbs into the back of the family SUV and eventually dozes off. When he awakes the next morning, he discovers his entire family has already left for the airport and he is now, you guessed it, home alone. Since the family is split between two flights due to a flight cancellation no one notices he's missing until they get to Tokyo. When Jeff and Pam show up initially to retrieve the doll, Max overhears them and misunderstands them, thinking they intend to kidnap and sell him. Afraid that if he calls the cops, they'll put his mother in jail for negligence, he has no choice but to defend himself and his home against the hapless couple. 

The film was directed by Dan Mazer from a script by Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell. The resulting film is a pretty blatant and straight-forward re-hash of the original film almost beat for beat. To their credit, the filmmakers do mix it up a little bit. One interesting choice was to make the robbers, Jeff and Pam in this case, more sympathetic characters who are just trying to overcome their hardship and save their own family home. I also liked that they had their own houseguests for the holidays and therefore had to keep tryin to explain their whereabouts when they were off trying to sneak off to go and get the doll back from Max. However, with this set-up, it makes an already implausible scenario even more implausible because everything could be cleared up with a quick conversation that neither Pam nor Jeff seize the opportunity to have. The weaknesses for the film are many and readily apparent. The biggest one is by making the intruders more sympathetic, they make Max less likable as a result. Much of the time, he comes off as a spoiled brat and is missing the same character arc Kevin went through in the original film and therefore remains somewhat unlikable. Also, if we are sympathizing with the plight of Jeff and Pam, it makes watching them go through Max's house of pain far less satisfying as each fall victim to one booby trap after another, with a couple of them leaving me wondering which Macaulay Culkin movie are they really remaking: Home Alone or The Good Son. They also re-do whole scenes in the film with little difference from the original film which makes this new film just feel like a cheap imitation. The laughs in the film is few and far between while also missing any of the heart or sentiment that made the original the beloved Christmas classic it is. The filmmakers do manage to make this film somewhat a legacy sequel and it was fun to see Devin Ratray return as Buzz McCallister, now working as a police officer. I also got some amusement out of learning through his character that Kevin McAllister now owns a home security company (Macaulay Culkin had the good sense to stay away from this though).  

The film does feature a solid cast and you can tell they are doing their best to try and make the film work. Archie Yates displays the same sort of charm that I enjoyed from him in Jojo Rabbit throughout the film, but the writing does not do his character any favors. Much of the time he comes off as a bit spoiled and entitled and doesn't seem to learn anything from his situation. Still, Yates does his best with a characterization that is seemingly all over the place and only sporadically sympathetic. Rob Delaney is amusing as Jeff, whose bantering with Max is what sets up the whole huge misunderstanding the plot of the film hinges on. He makes his character largely likable, if a bit dumb, who is driven to do some unlikable things out of sheer desperation. Ellie Kemper plays off Rob Delaney quite well as the two become more and more determined to retrieve the doll so they can save their home. Neither one of them come off as particularly unlikable throughout the film and made the movie watchable for me. Devin Ratray makes a cameo appearance as Buzz McCallister from the first two films and manages to recapture the character pretty well. I did find it amusing when he reveals every year Kevin calls in a report of a child left home alone to mess with him. Kenan Thompson makes a few amusing appearances as Jeff and Pam's relator who finds himself in a frequently awkward position since Jeff and Pam don't want the kids to know they're selling the house until after Christmas and has to try and explain why he's there to the kids. 

Overall, there is very little in Home Sweet Home Alone to justify it's existence. The few changes the make to the formula wind up actually hurting the film overall. It's hard to tell what the filmmakers were intending with this one. I can appreciate them trying to mix things up a bit with this entry, but the plot is a mess as I found myself sympathizing with the adult characters more than the kid. For a Home Alone movie, it had me wondering who this was made for. Today's kids are going to be turned off by the fact that much of the focus is not on Max. The adults who grew up with the original films are going to see this as a shallow cash-grab. It left me scratching my head as the disappointment set in. All the more so because the film had potential with a good cast but it all just falls apart with a very ill-thought out script.