I was very confident, very confident, waving everyone away who tried to warn me off this movie. Because it couldn't be any worse than some of the other Home Alone movies, could it? Could it?
The simple answer, which I can put at the start of this review, is no. Home Sweet Home Alone is not worse than some of the other Home Alone movies. It's also not very good though, and it's not very good in ways that are quite mind-boggling.
Here's the plot. Archie Yates plays Max Mercer, a child who ends up home alone while his family have headed to Tokyo. He is also the prime suspect when Jeff (Rob Delaney) and Pam McKenzie (Ellie Kemper) lose a valuable doll that could see the end of their current money woes. Jeff and Pam believe that Max has stolen the doll, and Max is under the impression that Jeff and Pam are looking to kidnap him. Excessive snacking, lessons about home being where the heart is, and booby-traps are very soon the order of the day.
Written by Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day, and directed by Dan Mazer, there's nothing inherently wrong with the people making this movie. Their backgrounds tend to be based more in content such as SNL, Ali G, and other non-kid-friendly fare, but I didn't see their names and immediately worry about the film they would deliver. Perhaps I should have. The direction isn't terrible, not really, but the script is poor, especially when you consider some of the plotting that makes the viewing experience a difficult and unrewarding one.
Never mind though, because I really like Delaney and Kemper. So that should be a plus, right? It is, but not enough of a plus to make up for the big negatives. Delaney and Kemper aren't used well here, although I hate to think how much I would have hated this film with other people in their roles. Aisling Bea could have been another good bit of casting, but playing the mother of the child left at home alone simply leads to her feeling like a very poor replacement for the superb Catherine O'Hara. There are some other people doing perfectly fine work here, but that work is overshadowed by the central performance from Yates. I don't want to spend much time ripping apart the performance of a young child, and Yates is definitely not helped by a script that makes his character almost completely unlikeable throughout (when he isn't recreating moments from the first Home Alone movie). All I will say is that his character is one of the most irritating youngsters I have seen onscreen in a very long time, and I spent most of the movie hoping that he would end up caught in one of his own traps.
There's an argument to be made for this movie being even less deserving of your time because of how it seems to invert so much of what made the original film a holiday classic, and there's absolutely nothing here that actually feels good enough to warrant this reworking of the concept, but a level of general technical competence, as well as the presence of both Delaney and Kemper, stop it from being among the worst of the worst. It's really bad though, and this is coming from someone who often tries to see the best in every movie I watch.
3/10
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