Christmas: Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)

Home Sweet Home Alone is bad, but it’s bad in ways that are revealing of the differences between 1990s family entertainment and that of the 2020s. This explains why I’m somewhat interested in the film as a text, even if I recommend that you don’t waste your Christmas movie viewing time on this film, which never recaptures the charm and fun of the beloved original Home Alone (1990).

To be clear, Home Sweet Home Alone utterly fails as a diegetic reboot for the Home Alone franchise. By “diegetic reboot,” I mean that the film both seeks to kickstart a new life for the brand while also connecting, albeit obliquely, to the storyworld of the first two films. For example, we learn, as the film goes on, that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister now runs a home security firm and that Kevin’s bully older brother Buzz (Devin Ratray) is now a deadbeat cop. But the connections are largely throw-aways: adult Kevin is never seen on screen (a good choice unless they could have coaxed out Macaulay Culkin) and Police Officer Buzz remains essentially a cameo. 

Before these less-than-satisfying breadcrumbs are thrown in, I could not discern where Home Sweet Home Alone was set, with the mix of English and American-accented main characters and unremarkable cookie-cutter suburbs playing like anywhere (nowhere) in the globalized 21st-century Anglosphere. (The film was shot in Montreal and never captures the look of the Chicago suburbs, so notable in John Hughes’ movies.)

As a matter of conception, Home Sweet Home Alone does not achieve the full-spectrum appeal that the landmarks of 80s and 90s family entertainment did, from E.T. (1982) to The Goonies (1985) to Home Alone, offering different pleasures to the different age groups all viewing the “family” movie together. In the first act, Home Sweet Home Alone focuses just as much on Jeff and Pam McKenzie, a struggling middle-class couple (played by Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper), as it does on the central boy character, Max Mercer (Archie Yates), and his mom (Aisling Bea). As the film develops, it gives the boy Max little to do once he is left home alone, until it’s time for him to set up booby traps. Most of the narrative conflict and emotional heart centres around Jeff and Pam, who eventually try to break into the home Max has been left alone in in order to retrieve the priceless doll they believe the boy has stolen.

In this respect, the film plays out something like a mash-up of Home Alone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), with our primary sympathies lying with Pam and especially Jeff, who is out of work. They are parents who are trying to earn enough from the doll to keep the family home they will have to sell in order to downsize their expenditures. The parental desire to “provide” and to furnish one’s family with abundance on holidays, which undergirds the themes of Christmas Vacation, provides the main source of genuine emotion in Home Sweet Home Alone. The National Lampoon associations also arise from the unwelcome arrival of Jeff’s more-successful brother (Tim Simons) and annoying sister-in-law (Ally Maki) and their toddler son; they seem to combine the obnoxiousness of Randy Quaid’s Uncle Eddie and family with the snobby yuppy neighbours (Nicholas Guest and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in Christmas Vacation.

My children were left confused about who they should be rooting for in Home Sweet Home Alone. Are Pam and Jeff “robbers,” they asked me? Well, not exactly; they just want to get back something they think was stolen. Is the boy good? Well, for most of the movie, we think he stole someone else’s precious property. This means that the film lacks justification for the malicious violence that it eventually deals out, and which we are meant to laugh at. We do laugh, but it’s conflicted and lessened. To be fair to director Dan Mazer, I imagine they wanted to downgrade the pain in 2021, but he’s from the Borat team, so he’s proven fine with dispensing misery to others. The essential problem with Home Sweet Home Alone is that robber “bad guys” (who clearly caused pain and misery to others in the original two films) aren’t the ones getting hurt in cartoonish yet viscerally painful ways. It’s just a normal mother and father making some dumb decisions. So we don’t laugh the same way, when Looney Tunes violence is being inflicted on them.

The original Home Alone is incredible at playing out the fully realized daydream of a young boy, from the home management and daily logistics we imagine we could complete to the delusions of grandeur—stopping the bad guys, saving the house! At the same time, Macaulay Culkin was a great child actor, conveying charm to adults, appeal to children, expressive cuteness and mischievousness in turns, as well as the venomous outbursts and moody regrets that mark childhood. In short, parents liked the boy, and kids wanted to be him.

The new boy, Max (played by Archie Yates, who had a turn in Jojo Rabbit) is largely uncharming and annoying here, and much of that is from the screenplay. He’s written unlike any boy I would like in real life. He’s catty and preening around his parents, not childishly stubborn and egotistical. He believes he’s superior to the adults around him, without the deep longing to be grown-up (and hidden recognition that he is not) that marks Culkin’s performance (think of the scene when he shaves). This boy basically spends a montage “home alone,” doing some wild fun, much of it rehashing the original’s beats, but the film lacks scenes of length and depth to get a real sense of Max genuinely reacting to and growing up from his time as a child thrust into new levels of responsibility. We don’t believe him when he says he’s lonely, and, perhaps revealing of 2021, we don’t see him trying to do any chores around the house. Did he eat food (not candy) while he was alone? Did he buy groceries?

Although the main problems stem from the screenplay, I have to observe that the film is shot and edited in ways that are detrimental to the slapstick humour. Slow motion, items flying at the camera, clever angles (recalling the omnipresent canted angles that haunt Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas [2000]), and other attention-seeking technical choices only further mediate the physical movements of the characters, thereby deflating the humour we derive from them. Slapstick is primarily comedy of the body, and so careful yet unobtrusive camera set-ups and detailed rehearsal are the best means to execute it (see the masters from Buster Keaton to Jackie Chan). Although Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper give it a good go, they lack the expressive genius of Daniel Stern’s facial expressions of pain and horror, and Joe Pesci’s furious energy and threat of real violence in the original film.

To be fair to Delaney and Kemper, they are easily the best parts of Home Sweet Home Alone. I think the wife is smartly written in her reluctance to take part, yet her stronger, even unhinged dedication to the plan, once things accelerate. As seen in the brilliant, foul-mouthed, yet meaningful comedy series Catastrophe (2015–19), Rob Delaney’s special ability is to run his mouth awkwardly in amusing ways, further burying himself after each comment, and in a family-rated film his talents are restrained, and the physical side of comedy, especially slapstick, is less his forte. 

In short, you are best off revisiting the first and second Home Alone movies and letting Disney’s attempt to reboot the franchise go unstreamed (send the message). But some consideration of what Home Sweet Home Alone tries to achieve, and where it fails, gives us a sense of family moviemaking at the end of 2021. We are not blessed this season.

3 out of 10

Home Sweet Home Alone (2021, USA)

Directed by Dan Mazer; written by Mikey Day and Streeter Siedell; starring Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Archie Yates, Aisling Bea, Tim Simons, Ally Maki, and Devin Ratray.

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