Hideous ‘Home Sweet Home Alone’ turns nostalgia into a booby trap
Disney+
This holiday season, step on a nail, take an iron to the face, or, if you really like pain, gather the family around “Home Sweet Home Alone,” a reboot of the 1990 classic with the guts to say, “We know we shouldn’t, and yet we did!”
It should be obvious that the concept of reviving the franchise, which made a star of Macaulay Culkin and a tourist destination out of the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka, comes with much more baggage than the usual nostalgia property. It’s not because “Home Alone” remains beloved to some who are reminded of childhood and the different types of movies made in the ‘90s and the almost Pavlovian response sparked by holiday music. It’s because the world has objectively changed in the last three decades (duh), and to sit back and laugh at a child in danger or, really, a kid who delights in causing the pain of others, is no longer a good ol’ time at the movies.
Don’t worry, though; for “Home Sweet Home Alone,” some changes were made. Instead of actual stakes that at least pit bumbling, selfish criminals against an innocent, isolated minor (who then behaves like a deranged, very troubled individual in the name of home defense), the 2021 version replaces Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern with Ellie Kemper (“The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) and Rob Delaney (“Deadpool 2”) as a couple in such dire financial straits that they have to sell their house. (Kenan Thompson plays a realtor constantly forced to pretend to be a personal trainer because the pair’s kids don’t know they’re planning to sell, resulting in, among other things, the use of the term “pancake butt.”) Unless, of course, they can reacquire the doll they A. Discovered five seconds ago is worth $200,000 on eBay and B. Are certain was stolen by Max (Archie Yates), a neighborhood British kid with glasses who thus of course gets called Harry Potter and, obviously, is the titular child forgotten by his parents as his extended family flies to Tokyo during the holidays.
Oh, by the way, Max believes Pam (Kemper) and Jeff (Delaney) want to kidnap and sell him. Which means “Home Sweet Home Alone” has merged the hilarious world of unemployment and foreclosure with the even funnier topic of child trafficking, then underlined by the fantastic, cartoonish purity of desperate parents being seriously injured by a terrified, neglected boy.
No matter how weird it now feels to watch the original or its sequel (which, yes, I loved back in the day and can still enjoy as markers of their time, but, no, I’ve never seen part 3, 4 or 5), that first movie, to its credit, put viewers on Kevin’s (Culkin) side right away as the bullied scapegoat of a family overwhelmed by the scale of a group gathering. There was a relatability to the potential chaos of the holiday season and a kid’s ability to feel isolated by a bigger world. “Home Sweet Home Alone” decides instead to establish Max as an entitled, whiny jerk while barely establishing his family (this is a movie where people like Pete Holmes, Andy Daly and Chris Parnell have at most a few lines, and sometimes just one or two). In less than eight minutes there has already been propaganda for McDonald’s and a joke about an open house visitor rifling through Pam’s underwear drawer. Soon there will be jokes involving O.J. and MC Hammer and airplane food. You will feel deep sorrow and deeper certainty that things will get worse, and they do.
This is the sort of movie whose idea of self-awareness is Jeff’s obnoxious brother Hunter (Timothy Simons of “Veep”) declaring, "I don't know why they're always trying to remake the classics. Never as good as the originals." And, when hiding from his family in a BMW in the garage before falling asleep so as to be forgotten, Max watches “Looney Tunes,” which director Dan Mazer (“Dirty Grandpa,” the underrated “I Give It a Year”) and writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell obviously believe is a cheeky nod to the wacky antics that will ensue when Max defends his house from Pam and Jeff’s attended reclamation of the valuable doll.
Instead, the idea that Max watches these cartoons and then reworks painless violence against animated animals into firing pool balls at real people’s heads unintentionally suggests the movie is saying that violent media creates violent kids, which would be hypocritical to say the least. Meanwhile, Buzz McCallister (Devin Ratray), who is now a Winnetka cop who does a lousy job of checking out the situation at Max’s house, tells another officer about the two (!) times his family forgot his little brother many years ago. This means that, if the ubiquitous original film doesn’t exist within the reality of the reboot (in which case the characters would surely be aware of it enough to make sure not to replicate the events), then you could still argue that the locals would know about those silly McCallisters and what happens when too many people are running late for the airport.
But “Home Sweet Home Alone” strains in every possible way to nullify brain function. Technology, obviously, has changed since 1990, so we have to be told that Max’s family’s version of an Alexa can’t make outgoing calls, and his mom (Aisling Bea) can’t call home because there are no landlines. But there is no reason why they don’t call any friends or Max doesn’t go to a neighbor’s or a friend’s after he decides that being home alone actually isn’t the nonstop funstravaganza he thought it would be.
Eventually the movie arrives at vague platitudes that can at best be described, to quote Jack Black in “High Fidelity,” as sentimental tacky crap, and are beyond disingenuous after the physical and emotional damage that has been wrought mere seconds before. There is a hot sauce called Satan’s Heinie and no awareness at all that these Midwesterners should be saying pop, not soda. There is an undercurrent of privilege, of people believing they deserve success while simultaneously proving that they don’t, capped off by the offensive notion of a magic solution to financial woes.
But maybe even worse than the flailing, broke couple set on fire and subjected to tacks and Legos and other forms of adolescent and adult torture, is the scene in which Max goes to a toy drive at a church, where items are being collected for children in need, and says, “Well, I’m definitely a child in need.” When told the toys are for kids who are less fortunate, he says, “I thought it was too good to be true,” only for Pam and Jeff’s son to eventually tell Max “Sounds like you deserve this [expensive water gun] as much as anybody.” Then a woman at the church takes the item from Max, thanking him for the donation, and he doesn’t correct her. But then she gives him the gun back when she mistakenly thinks his parents died two days ago.
It’s all a lead-up to when, having converted his house into an amateur battlefield with chilling success and detail, Max, powered by that hysterical misunderstanding about kidnapping and the super-soaker in his hands, holds the toy like a bloodthirsty ex-President and declares, “Locked and loaded.” Fittingly, “Home Sweet Home Alone” is like trying to capitalize on name recognition and winding up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, but much, much less funny.
F
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