It’s hard to express just how much Home Alone was a piece of me growing up. I watched the first film nearly religiously. My first flight as a 3 year old began with me screaming, “KEVIN!” at the top of my lungs because I thought that was just something you do. And as a young boy, for Christmas one year, I only had one ask — The Talkboy.
The second I saw Kevin McCallister using the Talkboy — a simple playback device that allowed users to record and play back audio at normal, slow or fast speeds — to trick adults into thinking he was one of them, I knew I wanted one.
For those that never had the luxury of such a device, the Talkboy came with a cassette tape. One side of the tape was blank, allowing for the user to record and playback audio to their hearts content. The other side of the tape was a collection of lines from the film which you could listen back and change the audio pitch.
Recording and playing back with slightly different changes to makes something that sounds different is interestingly enough a perfect way to describe Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It’s essentially the same movie as Home Alone, only with small alterations in pitch to make it feel like you’re watching something new.
Lost in New York bears all of the hallmark signs of sequelitis — when a sequel doesn’t really know how to move the story of the character forward, and so instead just decides to run things back, giving audiences a greatest hits collection of all of their favorite things from the first film with just a slightly different flavor.
The first Home Alone movie goes through so many hoops in order to make the idea that the McCallister family left Kevin at home somewhat believable (I wrote about this in my recent Home Alone review). And with an premise so insane, how do you do the same magic trick twice? Well, Home Alone 2 proves that the best way to do the same trick is to just do it again.
Kevin gets left alone again (shocker — this time it’s in New York), Harry and Marv are here to spring all of Kevin’s booby traps, there’s a strange elderly person that frightens Kevin until he befriends them for a scene of life lessons, and while the film’s plot is relatively the same as 1990’s original Home Alone, that wouldn’t be so bad if all of the movie’s jokes weren’t essentially recycled from the first.
Did you like Angels with Filthy Souls? Well you’ll love Angels with Even Dirtier Souls. Did you like when Kevin screams into the camera? He does that here too. Did you like when Kevin smart talks a store cashier? I have good news for you. Did you think it was great when Kevin’s family is trying to watch It’s a Wonderful Life in French? This time, watch them attempt to understand it in Spanish!
Don’t get me wrong, the formula for Home Alone works — it’s why its been such an endearing classic of the season for over a third of a century. But while the formula is entertaining, Home Alone 2 feels more like a New York version of the first film rather than a natural progression in story and character.
The Duncan’s Toy Chest and children’s hospital fund being the target for The Sticky Bandits is fun, but the film’s script doesn’t build the “you can’t mess with kids on Christmas” into Kevin like the first film builds on the “this is my house, I have to protect it” in the first film.
Oddly, the opening of the film finds Kevin far more concerned around Christmas trees with Catherine O’Hara’s Kim McCallister even drawing attention to how concerned he is about not having a Christmas tree in Florida, only for the film to drop that entirely until the end of the film’s final act.
The cast of characters is fun — Macaulay Culkin has a slightly more mature edge to Kevin this time around, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are doing Harry and Marv a little more slapstick than the first film, but still hilarious, and John Hear and O’Hara play Kevin’s parents with a comedic timing that just works.
But perhaps the film’s biggest standout character is Tim Curry’s Mr. Hector. While he doesn’t have the screentime of Harry or Marv, there’s something about that devilish Curry grin that is simply unparalleled and builds Hector as a solid secondary antagonist.
And while this will never top the original — apparently there is a growing contingent online claiming this the superior Home Alone — it is certainly fun.
I remember watching this and thinking, “yeah I would like to eat my own pizza and drink root beer in the back of a limo,” in the same way that I also said, “yeah, I would like my family to disappear for a moment.” The difference here is that something is lost in the change — where in Home Alone Kevin learns that he misses his family and that the negatives of his situation outweigh the positives, Lost in New York is mostly just a kids fantasy played out until the adults catch him.
It’s a blast for kids and entertaining enough for adult fans of the first, but with recycled jokes without the level of emotional weight of the first film, Home Alone 2 is always just going to be another sequel — maybe even the first in the beginning of the downward spiral that the Home Alone franchise famously becomes.
RATING: ★★★
Brandon Toks Movies 
Leave a comment