Home Alone

Note: This review contains spoilers for Home Alone.

If there’s one film series that could be considered a staple of ‘90s pop culture, it’s Home Alone. The original 1990 film came out a couple years before I was born, however I vaguely recall watching it, as well as its first two sequels, at least once on home video when I was younger, at a time where I didn’t have much of an attention span. With the idea floating around that it’s a Christmas movie on the grounds that it’s set around Christmastime, as well as Disney+ releasing a sixth installment, I decided to revisit this movie to see what the fuss was about. While flawed, it’s not hard to see why some consider this a holiday classic.

One night in Chicago, Illinois, the McCallister family is scrambling to prepare to leave for a Christmas vacation in Paris, while a police officer stands by to give the family fair warning about holiday burglaries. During all this, Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is berated by his family for his inability to do anything for himself, and later accidentally spills milk all over the family’s flight tickets while trying to get back at his older brother Buzz (Kevin Ratray) and is punished by being sent to sleep in the attic. After a power outage that night, the family oversleeps and nearly misses their flight, accidentally leaving Kevin home alone due to taking an improper head count. Meanwhile, a pair of robbers known as the Wet Bandits take advantage of the occasion by stealing from the houses of vacationers.

To the movie’s credit, it does go out of its way to try and explain the extraordinary circumstances Kevin finds himself in. Why was he left behind? Another kid got in the way of a head count and was mistaken for Kevin. Why didn’t the airport catch that Kevin was missing? After liquid was spilled on the flight tickets, Kevin’s was accidentally thrown away. Why couldn’t Kevin call the police right away? The aforementioned power outage also knocked out the phone lines for two days. Why couldn’t Kevin turn to anyone else for help? Most everyone in his neighborhood was also on vacation and one of his neighbors who isn’t, Marley (Roberts Blossom), is someone Kevin is irrationally afraid of for most of the movie. Naturally, at least half of these issues could be resolved if the McCallisters had cellphones, however such technology was uncommon back in 1990, so it is best viewed in the vacuum of when the movie was made.

Much of the movie is about Kevin’s character development into overcoming his fears, which the storytelling executes to good effect. Though he also grows as a person while left to his own devices, he can also be kind of a jerk and the rest of his family isn’t much better. His other siblings are often cruel to him and his parents seem to treat him as more of an afterthought, making it a little difficult to sympathize with Kevin’s mother Kate (Catherine O’Hara) when she tries to go back home ahead of everyone else to make sure he’s okay. To a lesser extent, what doesn’t help is that the McCallister parents and their relatives got First Class seats on the plane while the kids are stuck in Coach.

Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) wakes up to find himself home alone.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have any heart to it. Marley provides an emotional plotline in the second half of the movie that complements Kevin’s, in which he has become distant with his son and is afraid of speaking to him, while Kevin, who has overcome his fears over the course of the plot, encourages Marley to at least try. This then leads to more touching moments in the final act, complementing Kevin’s eventual reunion with his family.

Of course, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you’re likely aware of the series’ iconic booby traps, which Kevin employs the use of here to stop the Wet Bandits from raiding his home. If that’s what you’re in for, it doesn’t actually happen until the last 30 minutes, and even then, the traps are on-screen for only half that time. That said, their use is no less funny or cathartic. Additionally, the famous “Home Alone face”, as seen on the poster, has a more mundane explanation, seen twice when Kevin burns his face with aftershave.

The movie is also well-cast, which helps everything work as well as it does. Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister and Roberts Blossom as Marley are two stand-outs, and despite her character’s behavior early on, Catherine O’Hara still generally convincingly plays a mother desperate to reunite with her missing son. Though he doesn’t have much screentime, John Candy provides some good comedy as a polka musician who helps Kate on the last leg of her journey back to Chicago. As his later work on the first two Harry Potter films can attest to, Chris Columbus’ direction also helps, and knowing John Williams would later collaborate with him on those films retroactively lends a familiar Harry Potter vibe to the title sequence of Home Alone.

Home Alone is not a perfect movie, however it’s not hard to see how it became such a cultural icon of the ‘90s. Buried underneath the jerk-ish behavior of most of the cast is a lot of heart and, of course, the booby traps that Kevin McCallister thinks up against the Wet Bandits are a lot of fun to see in action. If you haven’t seen this film before and are looking to see what all the fuss is about, it’s worth watching at least once, and you may even walk away with a new holiday tradition if you enjoy it enough.