Film Review: Home Alone 3 (1997)

In a Chicago suburb, Alex is a young mischievous kid who has to stay home from school due to chicken pox. He receives a gift of a remote-controlled car, but little does he know that a series of events lead to a super-secret military microchip being concealed inside of it, and a gang of thieves are actively tracking it down. Alex will need to weaponize his house in order to outsmart the criminals.

I had ignored this sequel for years, pegging it as lame, disconnected trash. My curiosity got the better of me, but now I can confirm that it is indeed lame and disconnected. By 1996, Macaulay Culkin took a break from acting and turned down the chance to play a teenage Kevin McCallister—now we’re given a different group of characters who just can’t hold a candle to the original cast. Outside the hands of Chris Columbus, Raja Gosnell takes the director’s chair and cranks up the slapstick comedy to an obnoxious degree, clearly designed to cater to children with no regard for nuance or maturity. Worst of all though, this is a film that sacrifices credibility for the sake of its gags. You really want me to believe that a kid with an RC car can really outsmart high-tech international thieves that have eluded the FBI for seven years? This only works because the villains are nerfed repeatedly—even to the point of being outsmarted by a parrot on a few occasions. And a rat (although I did laugh at the callback to the “don’t move!” gag that clearly echoes the tarantula scene from the first film—Alice hitting her own teammate in the nether regions to hit a rat dangling from his pants might be the only funny part in this movie, but that might be saying something). It’s one of those comedies where the situations are so stupid and the setups are so weak that the gags have very little payoff. It’s not enough to watch bad guys wallow in mud and ice or get hit on the head with stuff—they bumble too much to be taken seriously, and the plotline fumbles too much to let it be taken seriously.

It is a shame though, because I can tell that this film really wants to jump on the tech-thriller bandwagon that defined the late 90s. The whole MacGuffin of the film definitely echoes the microchip from Sneakers, while using the thieves as villains only reminds me of The Saint, Ronin, and Entrapment. In an age that boasted The Rock, Air Force One, Brosnan’s Bond movies, and the first Mission Impossible movie, invoking terrorism and technology must have seemed like a slam-dunk decision to push this movie as relevant and spicy. And hot dang, even the inclusion of Rya Kihlstedt seemed like a way to make all of this even more modern and sexy, like having Catwoman in the movie (…you know what, it worked. Rya’s performance is my favorite part of this whole thing. Shame the plot demanded that she had to bumble through the climax across some lame gags though). The thing is, none of this should have ever factored into a Home Alone movie. Because it’s freakin’ Home Alone. Adding spy movie nonsense to a Christmas comedy is just coloring way too far outside the box. Could it have worked? Maybe with a lot more finesse. As it is here though, as part of an established franchise, it comes across as hackneyed, try-hard, and stupid.

Sadly, there really isn’t much more to this story. It does play up the whole “boy who cried wolf” angle as it shows grown-ups constantly clashing with Alex, who tries his hardest to do his due diligence and report crime when he sees it. It’s predictable more than it is tense. There is a major subplot in which Alex warms an old lady’s heart and she comes to realize how sweet he is—it’s cute and all, but it comes with the force of a sledgehammer, whereas the heartfelt connections in the last two movies were brush strokes. Worst of all, it feels weirdly disconnected as the film swings from the goofy comedy to super-cereal tech-thriller stuff to comforting Lifetime movie territory. It doesn’t help that Nick Glennie-Smith scored this like a cartoon, which only makes the goofy scenes sound lamer (and certainly a far cry from John Williams’ masterful scores from before).

Aside from Rya Kihlstedt, a very young Scarlett Johansson, and an acceptably fair performances from Olek Krupa and Haviland Morris, the cast is not particularly great. Alex Linz definitely tries to match the lovable mischief and good-hearted nature that Macaulay Culkin brought to Kevin in the previous films, but Alex stands no chance to fill those shoes—the character he plays comes across as superficial at best. The other villain characters (jeez, there are four of them) only exist to be buffoons, and it is frustrating since there are scenes where they actually are competent, until the script demands that they aren’t and have to bumble through buckets of adhesive and other ridiculous hazards. The film is presented with a notably brighter, more colorful flair than before, which makes it look candy-coated. Cinematography is often fast, loose, and in-your-face, catering even further into the kid demographic, but at the loss of depth and gravitas.

If I had seen this as a ten-year-old, I likely would have been sufficiently entertained, but still let down by the drop in quality concerning the writing and performances. Changes in the cast and crew are a large part of it, but the film still flunks out because of how it deviates from its predecessors to embrace the cartoony kid-friendly shenanigans without any sense of discipline. It is superficially entertaining with its gags and focus on ridiculous stakes involving military technology, but it still comes across as stupid. It’s ultimately on-par with movies like Cats and Dogs, Zoom, or the live-action Thunderbirds. Kids might love it, sure, but they deserve quality too. Let them watch the first two Home Alones at the least.

4/10