AHHHHHH!

HOME ALONE (1990)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia 

(Review originally written in 2001) 

I still don't get how "Home Alone" became one of the biggest moneymakers in box-office history. That
little tyke, Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), somehow touched a nerve with the American public and with his
less-than-frustrating attempts to booby trap two thieves while stuck home alone. The movie never
appealed to me but it is still a harmless kid's movie where the kids champion over the adults - a theme
that Culkin repeated too many times before escaping into oblivion.

As the movie opens, we are introduced to Kevin who is obnoxious and wishes his family would disappear. It is Christmas time and hardly the appropriate thing to say to your mother (played by Catherine O'Hara). She tells Kevin to go the attic and sleep there. Meanwhile, the whole family sleep away downstairs, ready for their plane trip the next day to Paris. The next morning, they leave in vans sans Kevin who has overslept. Kevin awakens, walks around the house looking for his family and then delights in that his wish came true. He eats junk food like there is no tomorrow, watches television all day, orders pizza, goes grocery shopping, and so on. But trouble threatens this paradise as he discovers that two burglars (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) are ready to steal valuables from his house. So Kevin actually manages to outwit and outmaneuver the burglars using enough booby traps to make Indiana Jones sweat.

"Home Alone" is directed by Chris Columbus and written by John Hughes, and one senses that the movie is a curiously uneasy mixture of family homilies and cartoonish violence. The movie wants to sell the idea that families do matter and Kevin learns this lesson from a mysterious neighbor who is named the "Snow Shovel Murderer" by the neighborhood kids. All of this is as thematically rich as a Lifetime movie but Hughes spends the second half of the film glorifying in some heavy violence, including the use of flame retardants on people's heads, nails used as weapons, refrigerators flung like box cartons, people falling and landing with Dolby-ized thuds, and so many examples of torture that I began to wonder what children are supposed to feel when they watch all this. Should they cheer Kevin on or should they feel repulsed by his actions? Of course, in the real world, Kevin would likely call the cops or 911 as most kids are trained to when confronted with danger in their own home. The world of this movie is a cartoon where an 8-year-old is omnipotent and can perform improbable stunts that would make Wilie E. Coyote blush.

I am not snickering at the movie because it is enjoyable enough overall and Culkin does wonders with his character of the all-powerful Kevin who cannot be outwitted. I also enjoyed Catherine O'Hara as the worrisome mother who flies back to Chicago and encounters a polka band leader (played by the late John Candy). Pesci and Stern make a great comic team and have some frighteningly funny moments. I am just not sure about Hughes's intentions with "Home Alone" when selling the idea of a unified, picture postcard family crossed with over-the-top violence. Think about it.