Endured by Jerry Saravia
In-name sequels bother me (Leonard Maltin calls them follow-ups but the brand name is still used with a number attached to it). None of the characters return from the first two "Home Alone" flicks so it begs the question (other than being a financial one), why bother making a third? Why hoodwink people with a new sequel if Kevin McCallister doesn't return? No Macaulay Culkin, no reason.
There is some semblance of a story about international thieves seeking a missile cloaking microchip placed inside a racing car toy! The toy is inside a plastic bag that is mistakenly taken by an older lady at a Chicago airport! The thieves follow the lady in a taxi to a suburban part of Chicago, the kind writer John Hughes has shown us innumerable times. You know, the houses are enormous and look unaffordable but if you have two working parents... The new kid is eight-year-old Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz) who has chicken pox and stays home from school alone because, you know, two working parents and two siblings (one played by Scarlet Johansson!) at school and nobody is ever home in Chicago during daylight hours. Nobody's home except for Alex and the mean old lady from the start of the film. When Alex spots one of these thieves at a nearby house, he calls 911! I'll give the movie credit for that since the first two films never showed Kevin calling the cops!
Other than a very funny bit involving a parrot on a phone's answering machine, nothing else in "Home Alone 3" elicits much of a chuckle or a smile. This Alex is just as good at developing booby traps as Kevin was, but he doesn't have much charm - he is just vanilla. So is the cast which includes Haviland Morris as Alex's mother who is too charismatic to just be a worrying mother. Comic pratfalls and multiple hits to the heads of these clumsy thieves with objects thrown at them that should kill them, "Home Alone 3" is unmemorable, unwarranted and inexplicably dull.
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