Movie Review – Home Alone 2: Lost In New York
Principal Cast : Macauley Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard, Devin Ratray, Hillary Wolf, Tim Curry, Brenda Fricker, Eddie Bracken, Dana Ivey, Rob Schneider, Leigh Zimmerman, Maureen Elisabeth Shay, Michael C Maronna, Gerry Bamman, Terrie Snell, Senta Moses, Daiana Campeanu, Kieran Culkin, Anna Slotky, Ralph Foody, Clare Hoak, Bob Eubanks, Ally Sheedy, Ron Canada.
Synopsis: Kevin is separated from his family again when he accidentally boards a flight to New York City during a Christmas trip to Miami. However he crosses paths with the same burglars, who now plan to rob toy stores on Christmas eve.
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One of those rare sequels that is the equal to its original – if not a hair better, in my opinion – Home Alone 2: Lost In New York is a bonkers fun Christmas comedy adventure that, while retreading some of the same material as the classic original, goes bigger, wider and more violent than ever before, with a returning Macauley Culkin, Joe Pesci, Catherine O’Hara and John Heard having that sweet, sweet special sauce making this follow-up an absolute barn burner. Throw in a stacked supporting cast, as well as a brief cameo by a future US President in Donald Trump, and a brand new playground for Kevin McCallister to wreak absolute havoc, this crowd-pleasing cartoon of a film will delight viewers both young and old. Home Alone 2 also re-teams screenwriter John Hughes with director Chris Columbus and a somewhat bigger budget, and while you might expect a sequel to the simplified violent opus of Home Alone to essentially remix the ingredients that made the original so much fun, neither filmmaker rests on his laurels, propelling the McCallister family into well-known territory while still earning the requisite emotional beats throughout. Much like Home Alone, Lost in New York satisfies in both a heart-warming Christmas movie level and as a violently sadistic cartoon of pratfalls, explosions and physical injury.
When his family make a mad slept-through-the-alarm dash to the airport at Christmas to fly to Florida for a family holiday, young Kevin (Macauley Culkin) accidentally boards a flight to New York City instead. Carrying his father’s credit card and some cash, Kevin takes in all the tourist spots of the city (including at a vantage point atop the World Trade Center), before finding his way to the Plaza Hotel to book a room. The hotel is staffed by the uppity and suspicious hotel concierge Mr Hector (Tim Curry) and bellhop Cedric (Rob Schneider), as well as the reservation desk’s arch-eyebrowed Hester Stone (Dana Ivey), all of whom look upon Kevin’s frivolous room service requests with increasing concern. Meanwhile, recently escaped criminal duo Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) have seconded their way to New York City, ostensibly to rob a local toy store of funds raised to go to a children’s orphanage. Naturally, because New York is such a small city, they bump into Kevin, and begin their violent cat and mouse game of outwitting each other once more.
Longer, louder, and certainly more brutal; Home Alone 2 ups the ante considerably both in terms of scope and the violence inflicted upon Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern’s haplessly inept criminal duo, who appear to have learned nothing in the time since they last ran into Macauley Culkin’s Kevin. Instead of confining Kevin to a single location for much of the film, screenwriter Hughes and director Columbus give their pint-sized protagonist an entire city to play in, having him roam the streets unencumbered by adult supervision most of the time. The plot kicks off with yet another classic Hollywood double-play – Kevin follows a man he thinks is his father onto a plane bound for New York, while his actual family jet set to the tropical climate of Miami for the holidays – Catherine O’Hara’s sublime revisiting of her declarative exhortation of “KEVIN!” is priceless, and plays exquisitely as a parent more than it ever did for me as a teenager. The contrivance of plot mimicry from the original film is sleight-of-hand fun without making things obvious, but it certainly ensures countless internet discussions about just how horrifying Kevin’s parents truly are that they’d misplace a child yet again at the busiest time of the year. A side-note: about the only thing that dates this film is that after spending a couple of days racking up a room service bill at the Plaza Hotel, the total comes to under $1000, which is laughably cheap given all that we see Kevin order up.
With the preamble out of the way (for some reason, Kevin has yet again been cast as the black sheep of his family, none of them remembering what happened a year or so previous), Kevin arrives in New York and, much like he did when he figured out he was home alone, takes to the city for a spending spree unlike any a kid has had before. It’s a glorious montage of popular New York tourist spots, as well as an awkward visit to the World Trade Center for a protracted helicopter pullback shot, before we settle in to Kevin’s idyllic abuse of America’s hotel system. The arrival of Marv and Harry is almost secondary, and occurs well into the movie proper, before the central plot of robbing a toy store (run by a fabulously patriarchal Eddie Bracken) forces their collision with Kevin once again. Sure, much of Home Alone 2’s plot is based on a lot of heavy convenience, but if you overlook it and simply roll with it it’s a hell of a lot of fun. The film’s sidebar plot of Kevin’s mother trying to get to New York City isn’t quite as energetic or well-crafted this time around, but the addition of Brenda Fricker as a Central Park bird lady and her relationship with Kevin (mirroring that between Kevin and Roberts Blossom’s storyline in the original film) is welcome in that it once again offers some soul and emotion to what is an otherwise frantic chase and race movie.
The key players all tread their characters with ease – watching both the original and this sequel in quick succession, it’s amazing just how easily they seem to return to these roles in terms of continuity, with Culkin a touch less wooden here than previously, while Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern continue to mine comedic gold with every frame. The film increases the volume and frequency of bodily harm perpetrated on, and by, Pesci and Stern’s characters, with a staple gun, electrocution, bricks and a whole toolbox flung in their direction with varying degrees of cartoon violence. The sound effects for these sequences is intended to vacate the serious nature of a person being clobbered by a brick to the head, or having an enormous iron chimney flung onto one’s genitalia, and youngsters will absolutely delight in just how violent a lot of this all appears to be. To his credit, Chris Columbus maintains the original film’s fantastical kids-flick aesthetic with surprising results: a film that’s more violent, more bone-crunchingly devastating to the human body than it has any right to be, with a delightfully seasonal tonality you can’t help but be wrapped up in. Again, Pesci and Stern’s reactions to their injuries is mostly why a lot of the film works: without their commitment to the stunts and the resultant horror of almost certain death, you’d actually end up rooting for them to take Kevin down.
A near-perfect Christmas movie, Home Alone 2 is easily one of my favourite films set in the Big Apple. Uproarious plot mechanics aside, the final act takedown of the hapless Harry and Marv continues to be a spectacle of stunts and practical effects (rumour has it that Joe Pesci suffered legit burns to his head when his hat was set on fire as a gag) that elevates this from a simple sequel to a legitimately heart-warming family classic. As a Christmas movie, a lot of the holiday joy might be absent for large portions, but it always returns to the things that matter most: family and togetherness, with analogous themes running through both films that circle back again once more. A perfect one-two punch with the first film, Home Alone 2 is a rare sequel that betters the conceit of the original and delivers yet more crowd-pleasing shithousery from everyone’s favourite 90’s screen scamp. A delightful holiday classic that remains iconic thanks to a bag of memorable sequences and performances, not to mention Chris Columbus’ terrific New York City-set direction.
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