Home Alone: Lost in sequels

Let me start by saying that when I decided to review Home Alone 3, I started going over things I wanted to say in my head. Based on what I remembered from the last time I saw this movie, I was going to give it a three star rating, but after watching it again, I’ve decided to give a four star rating.


Now to the review....

A band of hi-tech international thieves: Peter Beaupre (Olek Krupa), Earl Unger (David Thornton), Burton Jernigan (Lenny Von Dohlen), and Alice Ribbons (Rya Kihstedt) working for a North Korean terrorist organization steal an Air Force computer chip. This chip would make missiles undetectable by radar.

In order to sneak the chip past air port security, they hide it in a toy car. But the bag with the car gets switched with another bag. The bag is traced to a neighborhood in Chicago. They find out that the car has ended up in the hands of eight year-old Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz), who is home alone from school because he has chicken pox. Now the thieves are trying to get the chip back, but Alex has other plans.



Alex D. Linz’s character replaces McCauley Culkin’s Kevin MacAllister as the main character, a boy who is home along battling bungling criminals. This transition is fairly smooth. Linz does a good job, save for one scene where you can tell he’s reading his lines.

As for as the bad guys go, the transition from Marv (Daniel Stern) and Harry (Joe Pesci) to the above listed criminals isn’t so smooth. Granted, Krupa and company are very funny, but not as funny as Stern and Pesci. I just don’t see how they can go from being extremely smart to bungling idiots in a matter of minutes. Also, I've spotted a problem, Krupa and Kihstedt’s characters have foreign-sounding accents at some points in the movie, then they don’t.

One last thing. This installment of the Home Alone series doesn’t have as much heart as the first two. For one thing, this one doesn’t happen before Christmas (although they play two Christmas songs during the movie), it happens after, so the last scene where the family is re-united and makes up isn’t as touching. In the first two movies, Kevin befriends a social outcast that he was once afraid of (a falsely rumored shovel-slayer and a homeless woman). That character that the main character befriends has been replaced by a cranky old bag that lives near Alex.