By Geno McGahee
There have been a lot of HOME ALONE movies and, for the most part, I’ve liked them all with the exception of HOME ALONE 4. The others, I’ve quite enjoyed, even though the first and second with Macaulay Culkin are obviously the best.
Disney Plus has made a sequel/reboot/re-imagining or whatever it is that you want to call it in HOME SWEET HOME ALONE, and I was ready to not like it. I just assumed it would be complete shit, but this wasn’t just a cash grab. This film had a lot of humor that worked.
Jeff (Rob Delaney) and his wife, Pam (Ellie Kemper), have no choice but to sell their house. Max (Archie Yates), a ten-year-old, and his mother, Carol (Aisling Bea), visit an open house to use the bathroom. The interaction between Max and Jeff is very funny. Jeff has a doll collection that he contends belongs to his mother, but Max challenges him on it, noting that he’s “one of those guys.” It was hilarious.
One of the dolls that Jeff owns is worth 200 grand and it is now missing. He assumes that Max must have stolen it. At the same time, Max is left home alone, and now we have much of the same situations that we’d expect from the wet bandits, but there is no ill intent. Jeff and Pam team up to break into the house and take back the doll, but a misunderstanding makes Max think that they are trying to steal him and sell him to creepy old women. This leads to a battle.
The slapstick comedy that we have become accustomed to in the HOME ALONE series is still here and still funny. Delaney and Kemper are very funny in their roles and work well together. Yates does well in the role of the resourceful child, but he fades away in the shadow of the intruders. In the HOME ALONE movies, Culkin was able to keep the attention of the audience and was easy to root for. Yates doesn’t have that. He had potential with some one-liners that he had early on, but he was pretty unremarkable otherwise.
If you are expecting anything new here, you won’t have it here. This is a celebration of the HOME ALONE series and pays homage as it goes along, although I could have done without the wink at the camera about remakes. I hate that shit. They decide to bring back Buzz (Devin Ratray) from the original to link the two, but it wasn’t flushed out too much. He mentions Kevin several times and I thought that we might see a Culkin cameo, but sadly not.
The traps set for the intruders aren’t as inventive as the first, second or even third one, but they still provide some laughs. The slapstick in this works because Delaney and Kemper sold it so well and are natural comedic actors to begin with. Anyone else would not have been able to make this work, but they did and they deserve credit for their skills here.
With the intruders being good people, the end result is different than the other films, but this follows the HOME ALONE formula as closely as possible. HOME ALONE HOME SWEET HOME is worth a watch. It’s not as good as the others (except for 4), but I laughed more than I anticipated. One of the funniest lines was Jeff panicking about being a new fish in prison and “new fish get got.” I found it so funny.
I recommend this one. It wasn’t bad at all, but they could have found a child actor with more charisma to sell that role, which was the most important role of the film.
