93 min | PG | November 12, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
A kid gets left behind at Christmas while two desperate adults plot to break into his house. Disney resurrects a corpse and props it up with the name of a man who died in 2009. The traps still work. Nothing else does.
Max Mercer is a smart-mouthed boy whose large family flies to Tokyo for the holidays and forgets him in suburban Chicago. Pam and Jeff McKenzie are a married couple losing their home to foreclosure. They believe Max stole a valuable antique doll from their house, and they plan to take it back. The film stages the burglars as sympathetic working people and the child as a wealthy nuisance. This inversion is the only idea here, and the movie cannot decide whether it means it.
Archie Yates plays Max with the same precocious energy he brought to Jojo Rabbit, but the script gives him sarcasm instead of fear. He never seems alone or afraid, so the home invasion carries no stakes. Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney play the McKenzies as decent people pushed to a dumb plan, and they generate the only genuine pathos in the film. Their scenes about money and shame belong in a better movie. Aisling Bea plays Max’s mother Carol with frantic phone calls that recycle the original’s airport panic without earning it.
Dan Mazer directs from a script by Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell, both Saturday Night Live writers, and the structure betrays the sketch-comedy instinct. The cause-and-effect rigor that made the original traps satisfying is gone, replaced by physics gags that ignore their own setups. The slapstick finale is overlit and flat, shot in bright digital video that drains the menace from every fall and every collision. John Debney’s score quotes John Williams without conjuring any of the warmth, telling you to feel things the images refuse to deliver.
The film is a brand exercise wearing a dead man’s name. It invokes John Hughes characters and Williams cues to borrow an affection it never builds on its own. Devin Ratray returns as Buzz McCallister in a cameo that exists to remind you of a film you would rather be watching. Home Sweet Home Alone has the parts of a Home Alone movie and none of the cruelty, fear, or craft that made the parts matter.