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Rating: PG
Director: Chris Columbus
Writers: John Hughes
Stars: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern
Release Date: November 20, 1992
Run time: 2 hours, 00 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
The McCallister family is preparing to spend Christmas in Miami, and gathers at Kate and Peter's Chicago home. Their youngest son, Kevin, views Florida as contradictory to Christmas, due to its tropical climate and lack of Christmas trees.
At a school Christmas pageant, during Kevin's solo, his older brother Buzz embarrasses him; Kevin retaliates by pushing him, which causes the entire choir to fall and ruins the pageant. At home, Buzz makes a false apology to Kevin, which the family accepts, but Kevin refuses to apologize for his actions and berates his family for believing Buzz's lies and for wanting to spend Christmas in Florida. He storms off to the attic, wishing to have his own vacation alone.
The next morning, the family oversleeps and rushes to the airport. Kevin goes with them, but he becomes separated while carrying Peter's bag and accidentally boards a flight to New York City. Upon arrival, he decides to tour the city and encounters a homeless woman tending to pigeons in Central Park, who scares him off. He uses Peter's credit card to check in at the Plaza Hotel, not knowing that his old rivals, the Wet Bandits (Harry and Marv), now renamed the "Sticky Bandits" due to Marv's sticky glove, have also reached the city after escaping from prison.
On Christmas Eve, Kevin visits a toy store whose kindly owner, Mr. Duncan, plans to donate the day's sale proceeds to a children's hospital. After Kevin makes a donation, Mr. Duncan gives him a pair of ceramic turtledoves in thanks, instructing him to give one to another person as a gesture of eternal friendship. Kevin encounters Harry and Marv upon leaving the store and flees back to the Plaza. The concierge at the hotel confronts Kevin about his use of Peter's credit card, now reported as stolen; Kevin flees the hotel but is caught by Harry and Marv. Marv mentions his and Harry's plan to rob the toy store before Kevin escapes in an encounter with a female passerby, who slugs Harry and Marv.
Earlier, upon landing in Miami, the McCallister family discover that Kevin is missing and file a police report. After the police trace Peter's credit card, the family flies immediately to New York. Meanwhile, Kevin goes to his uncle Rob's townhouse, only to find it vacant and undergoing renovations. In Central Park, Kevin encounters and eventually befriends the pigeon lady, who takes him to Carnegie Hall. She explains how her life collapsed when her lover left her, and Kevin encourages her to trust people again. After considering her advice that he perform a good deed to make up for his misdeeds, and recalling Mr. Duncan's intent to donate to the hospital, he decides to prevent the toy store robbery.
Kevin rigs the townhouse with handmade booby traps, catches Harry and Marv in the process of robbing the store, and breaks its front window to set off the alarm. After taking their picture, he lures them to the townhouse where they repeatedly injure themselves in the traps. Kevin evades them, calls the police from a pay phone, and flees toward Central Park. Harry and Marv catch him after he slips on ice and prepare to shoot him, but the pigeon lady throws a bucket of birdseed onto them, attracting a massive flock of pigeons and incapacitating the pair until the police arrive to arrest them. Kevin slips away, leaving photographic and tape-recorded evidence against Harry and Marv, and Mr. Duncan recovers the donation money and finds a note from Kevin explaining the broken window. The McCallisters arrive in New York, and Kate, remembering Kevin's fondness for Christmas trees, finds him making a wish at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
On Christmas morning, a truckload of free gifts arrives at the McCallisters' hotel room, sent from a grateful Mr. Duncan for foiling the robbery. Kevin reconciles with his family and gives one of his turtledoves to the pigeon lady, cementing their friendship.
My Review:
Have you ever had a really great experience somewhere, but when you revisited the place later, it was still good but lacked the magic of your first time through? That's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It's more or less a copy and paste of the first movie's cast and plot, but with the twist of a venue change. Macauley Culkin is still fantastic as the charming, precocious, and manipulative Kevin. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern were both still great as the hapless but also death and injury immune bad guys. It's genuinely remarkable acting to turn repeated attempts to murder a child into comedy and Stern in particular is great at this. There were several funny moments throughout the film, from Kevin delivering funny one-liners to his pursuers' slapstick falls and injuries. There were also several heart-string tugging moments, too. Kevin's reunion with his terrible mom is still moving, as is Kevin's turtle-doves gift to the pigeon lady. It's just that the whole thing was too familiar. The movie needed more than just a location change.
You had a sense in the plot that John Hughes was even a little uneasy (or at least uncomfortably self-aware) about what he was doing while writing the screenplay, with characters talking about how everything feels like the previous year and the McAllister parents laughing awkwardly with police about how losing their son is becoming a family tradition. I guess that the movie had to address the elephant in its own room (namely, that none of this would be funny in real life), but the attempts to do that largely didn't work for me.
It was subtle, but an important change on close inspection, that the sequel left behind the thin layer of story-telling reality in which the original was grounded. In the first Home Alone film, Kevin had a character arc. He was a lot closer to being a realistic person. He was a spirited but reasonably fearful 8 year old boy, with no adults (or so he thought) to whom he could reach out. Put in a terrible situation, he had to learn to take care of himself and to master his own fear. We saw a progression of Kevin going from making noise while hiding under the bed when Harry and Marv came to his door, to next deceiving the criminals more boldly, by staging a big fake party, to finally, confronting them directly and fending them off himself. It's an unrealistic arc, but an arc nonetheless.
In the sequel, Kevin arrives essentially fully formed at the start of the movie. He's not a normal 10 year old. He's smarter than everyone around him and he's unafraid to manipulate his surroundings to his own benefit. He's the same at the film's end. He doesn't grow or learn anything. Worse, and this makes the movie harder to watch, nobody else around him has learned anything, either. His family is somehow worse to him in this movie than they were in the original. The parents once again forget to wake Kevin up before racing to the airport. He wakes himself up, though, and gets himself there. In the race through the airport, neither of Kevin's parents keep a hand on their smallest child. They don't even notice he's missing until they reach the baggage claim. Given the events of their previous trip, locating Kevin on the plane would have been the most natural thing to do, for any loving parent, and neither of Kevin's parents do that. By the end of this movie, there's a more than small part of you that hopes he eventually gets away from these people for good.
Harry and Marv have learned nothing, either. They continually underestimate him and they pay the price. The hardest thing to understand about the plot of this movie is why they chase Kevin into his booby-trapped house. They had successfully robbed the toy store. They had the cash in hand. They were already on the run. Even if Kevin could pin the toy store robbery on them with photographs, what does it matter? It's not as though the police were not already looking for them. They should have taken the cash, relocated to a new city again, and left Kevin alone. Who said a movie for kids has to make sense, though?
On the whole, the movie is relatively kid-safe. There are a couple of bad words (Kevin's dad uses the d-word when he finds out Kevin is in NYC and Kevin calls the thieves the a-word later in the movie.) I think the violence-level is about the same as the original. Marv getting hit in the head with about five bricks, thrown from a roof, was tough to watch. But Daniel Stern plays it so comedically that you can largely get past that. Instead of stepping on a nail, he gets shot with a staplegun in this film. Joe Pesci's Harry gets his head set on fire again, with the flame burning quite a bit longer this time. There wasn't really a big laugh moment like the tarantula on Marv's face in the original, but the pigeons swarming the two bad guys came close. If you're thinking of watching it with kids, the scene you should probably be most careful about is the old gangster movie, within the movie, wherein Kevin watches a mobster shoot a woman with a tommy gun. We see Kevin watching through his fingers at this part rather than seeing it on screen ourselves, but that might be too much for some people.
Home Alone 2 is probably best remembered for its guest stars. In what is his most well-remembered TV or film cameo, Donald Trump directs Kevin to the front desk of hotel before Kevin checks in. Tim Curry and Rob Schneider both play memorable Plaza Hotel employees. Irish character actress Brenda Fricker (A Time to Kill, So I Married an Ax Murderer) plays the infamous "pigeon lady" and somehow brings that person to life, while keeping her sane and endearing. It's a shame that we do not see whether she takes Kevin's advice in the same way that we learned Marley did in the original.
Because of the repeating history, and the outlandish plot, this is the sort of movie sequel that inspires fan theories - ranging from Kevin's uncle being the real villain to his dad being mobbed up. I don't know that any of the various theories really work as well as the implication from within the story itself, namely that his parents are rich and busy and that to some extent neither of them likes Kevin very much. Is that better or worse than Peter McAllister being in the mafia? I don't know. In any case, they are raising a son who seems on track to be a sociopath with an inclination to both help good people and to hurt bad people. Maybe Kevin McAllister is the answer to how someone could grow up to be a vigilante superhero without first being motivated by the death of family members.
Overall, even if the review sounds critical, I still mostly enjoyed the movie despite it being so flagrantly a repeat of the original. Culkin's Kevin was a fun character to revisit and New York City at Christmas time makes a really great backdrop for just about anything on-screen. With some caveats of caution regarding its potential inappropriateness for very young children, I recommend giving it a rewatch.
Have you seen Home Alone 2: Lost in New York? If so, what did you think?
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