Writer(s): John Hughes, based on characters by Hughes
Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O'Hara
If you’ve seen the first Home Alone, then there’s really no
reason to waste time watching the second.
Sure, the settings have changed, and so have some of the characters, but
you’ll get a feeling of déjà vu, especially if you are expecting something a
little different from the original. Home
Alone worked in spite of itself—for starters, how in the hell could two parents
forget their own son—but all of that was forgiven thanks to the charm of
Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, the pitch-perfect lunacy of Daniel Stern
and Joe Pesci as the two inept burglars trying to break into his house, and the
sheer craziness of it all.
But how do you make a sequel to a movie that already covered
just about all the ground that it could possibly cover? That’s simple: you keep the formula that made
the original so much money, but move it to a different setting, and hope that
it works. And that’s exactly what the
filmmakers did, and it doesn’t.
The biggest sin Home Alone 2 commits, is also another
grievance that befalls many sequels: it
tries to be bigger than its predecessor.
So instead of just facing off against the same two bumbling burglars
from the first one (who happened to break out of jail, and just happened to
stumble into New York on the same day Kevin does), he now has to face
suspicious hotel workers, and the general terror of living in the big
city. In other words, gone is the
wonderful simplicity of the first, replaced by a movie that seems so desperate
to entertain, that it tosses one half-baked idea right after another at the
viewer.
Everything here starts off the same: every family member
shows up to the McCallister’s the night before a planned trip to Florida . Once again, Kevin is forced to sleep
upstairs, and once again, an alarm error forces them to be late (this time,
Kevin’s dad accidentally unplugs his alarm, and not one single other person
sets one as a backup). This time,
however, Kevin makes it to the airport with his family, who once again must run
so fast that basic human functions, like making sure Kevin is with them, cease
to work. Before you know it, he has
lagged behind (from trying to put batteries into his Talkboy recording device),
and ends up following the wrong person to the wrong plane. Uh oh!
Once again, his parents don’t even notice until they are well up in the
air.
Which brings me to another point: The first one also managed
to at least elicit a modicum of sympathy for the parents, even though the
mother was an insufferable bitch, and the dad seemed more interested in
ignoring the situation, and attempting to make the most of his vacation. But to let it happen AGAIN…that’s almost
enough to get a writer’s artistic license permanently revoked, even within the
broader confines of a children’s movie.
And just because it pokes fun of the situation itself doesn’t make it any
easier to accept; the worst scene involves Kevin’s mother berating hotel
employees for letting her son check in without a parent. Wait, aren’t you the woman that lost
him…twice…and you’re going to try to make them look like the idiots? Uh uh, not this time.
Continuing the tradition of having a
believed-to-be-creepy-but-really-just-misunderstood character in these, we meet
the Pigeon Woman, so called because she always has pigeons hanging all around
her. Once again poor Kevin is terrified
of her at first, only to learn that she’s a good person; they also end up
passing on helpful advice to each other (though this time, hearing a much older
woman seek love counseling from a 10-year-old child is really kinda creepy, but
maybe that was just me).
Even the film’s duration gets the “bigger is better”
treatment, with its run-time clocking in at a bloated two hours, more than
fifteen minutes longer than the first; it feels even longer considering it’s
got no new ground to trod, or nothing new to say. I praised the first for holding our attention
until it got around to the cartoony violence—this one also holds off on the
violence until the end, the only difference being that I nearly dozed off twice
before we made it there.
Of course, this review (as with just about all of mine) are
more geared toward the adult-point-of-view; undiscerning children will no doubt
find plenty to like here, assuming they enjoyed the first one. At the risk of sounding like a real Scrooge,
I must confess that Home Alone 2 is every bit as boring as the first one was
entertaining.
RECAP: Not even Macaulay Culkin can save it this time
around—this is essentially the first one, only with a change of settings, and
an overabundance of characters and plot elements. It’s in direct contradiction of what made the
first one, namely its charming simplicity, so effective. Laughs are few and far between, and the two
hour run time is ridiculously excessive.
It has its moments, and it will certainly entertain the little ones for
a while, but there aren’t enough of them to justify slogging through this recycled
landfill of overused ideas.
RATING: 4.5/10
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