“Home Sweet Home Alone” Review
Max Mercer (Archie Yates) defends his home in “Home Sweet Home Alone,” a reboot/sequel to the original classic available on Disney+.
I have a personal rule when it comes to film: don’t ever judge a film by its marketing. How many films are there where the trailer looks phenomenal and the actual release flops? Tons! There are also several films with less than stellar marketing that turn out to be golden eggs. Films like “Frozen,” “Minority Report” and “Batman Begins” all had bad trailers but are absolutely wonderful. So, when I saw the trailer for “Home Sweet Home Alone” on Disney+ and its 70,000 dislikes on YouTube, I said to myself “let’s just see how the movie is. Maybe it’ll be good.” I was wrong.
Set in the present day, well after Kevin McCallister defended his home from the Wet Bandits and learned the true meaning of family, a new kid named Max (Archie Yates) draws the ire of Jeff and Pam McKenzie (Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper) who suspect him of stealing a valuable antique doll. When Max is accidentally left home alone by his family, Jeff and Pam decide to break into his home where, in true “Home Alone” fashion, they are met with a series of delightfully sadistic traps.
“Home Alone” is an absolute classic and I certainly wasn’t expecting this new film to immediately match the original’s charm. However, I was amazed at just how empty “Home Sweet Home Alone” felt. The biggest problem the film possesses is that it tries to replicate the original’s formula but without a specific idea why the original is so beloved. While I hesitate to compare and contrast the original and this new entry, “Home Sweet Home Alone” wants to be the original so badly that it’s inevitable.
At 93 minutes, “Home Sweet Home Alone” isn’t much shorter than any of the other “Home Alone” films. But it tries to juggle too much. In “Home Alone,” all of it was dedicated to MacCulley Culkin as Kevin McCallister with simple, but memorable thieves Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). “Home Sweet Home Alone’s” runtime is split between Max, annoyed with his family, wishing to be alone for Christmas and Jeff and Pam having to sell their house with Jeff having lost his job.
While the decision to give more development to the thieves is an interesting one, there’s simply not enough time in the film to equally flesh out these characters. As a result, the film feels rushed and not one character is identifiable which is sad since all of these actors are incredibly funny with Archie Yates being a loveable goof in “Jojo Rabbit.”
(From Left) Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney star in “Home Sweet Home Alone” as two thieves at the end of their rope.
What’s surprising is the incredibly dull humor. The writers of the film, Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day, are incredibly talented at “Saturday Night Live” so the fact that so few gags work was disheartening to me. I think that, since the original is so unique, any attempt to replicate the original without injecting a unique premise looks desperate. The film’s direction, under Dan Mazer, feels so rapid that little impression is given.
However, there are some good qualities to the film. Some of the physical humor was pretty funny and, like most of the other “Home Alone” films, the traps were mean-spirited enough to elicit a smile on my face. Without giving anything away, there is a cameo from the original film that was so hilarious that I actually had to pause the film because I was laughing so hard.
Honestly, I’ve seen every “Home Alone” film (all six of them) and, with the exception of the first one and the scenes from “Home Alone 2: Lost In New York” that featured Tim Curry, they’ve all been different levels of bad. If there’s anything to learn from “Home Sweet Home Alone,” it’s that there is really no clean way to make a good film using this concept. As much as I wanted this film to be good, that just isn’t the case.
