The abiding premise of Home Alone — a precocious tot in suburban Chicago defending his home against bumbling burglars with an array of increasingly complicated booby traps — feels like the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle pitch that could only sustain itself for one perfect movie. And yet, like its fellow Christmas-siege classic Die Hard, that hasn’t stopped studio execs from mining the concept for, count ’em, four sequels and counting. (A fifth, Home Sweet Home Alone, is set to premiere on Disney+ on November 12th.)
After the success of the 1990 original, written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus — a film that grossed nearly $500 million at the box office and catapulted Macaulay Culkin to superstardom — a sequel naturally followed, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Expanding the scope of the action beyond one suburban Chicago home to the buildings and streets of the Big Apple, it felt like a suitable escalation of the original premise. It’s got everything: Tim Curry as a mincing concierge, Oscar winner Brenda Fricker as a wise, homeless pigeon lady, future President Donald Trump forcing his way into a cameo.
But after that, the series expanded its brief outside the life and misfortunes of plucky young Kevin McCallister; it turns out that, all across America (though mostly in suburban Chicago), there’s a host of tousled-haired moppets just itching to rain down holy fire on any clumsy criminals who deign to set foot inside their castle. And through one theatrically-released sequel, and two direct-to-TV entries after that, the tradition of children giving adults concussions in the name of protecting private property has stood strong for the last 30 years.
With Home Sweet Home Alone just around the corner to continue Kevin McCallister’s trap-laying legacy, let’s look at how the franchise has fared without its original star, and whether there aren’t any hidden gems among the low-budget rabble.
Home Alone 3 (1997)
The Kid: With no Macauley, original creator and writer John Hughes (returning for the last time in the series) and director Raja Gosnell (who edited the first two Homes Alone) settled for the next best thing: dimple-cheeked bowl cut recipient Alex D. Linz as Alex Pruitt, another Evanston kid with an overactive imagination and a preternaturally-advanced vocabulary. He’s a solid replacement for Kevin, honestly, feeling and looking even younger and more precocious than Kevin, and his essential sweetness makes him feel more like a hero than the comparatively cynical Kevin. Unlike the first two entries, the contrivance that gets him home alone is a bit more realistic: he’s got chicken pox, and his workaholic parents — was there any other kind in the ’90s? — can’t look after him.
The Family: Unlike the overflowing McCallister clan, the Pruitts seem a much more modest upper-middle-class family with more realistic problems. Mother Karen (Haviland Morris) is the classic overworked ’90s mom, juggling the demands of work with the stressors of motherhood, which isn’t helped by the dim-witted patriarch Jack (Kevin Kilner). Alex has two siblings that get on his nerves (one of whom is played by a young Scarlett Johansson!), but they ultimately come out in support of him. “You’re a hero!” ScarJo tells young Alex at the end. No small praise from a future Avenger.
The Crooks: No longer content with petty thievery, Home Alone 3 leaps straight to the “international terrorist” well, a quartet of supposedly world-class criminals descending on Alex’s little Evanston neighborhood to recover a top-secret Air Force computer chip — hidden in an RC car no less — mistakenly sent to Alex’s street. They’re no Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern: apart from Olek Krupa’s dastardly mastermind Peter Beaupre, the other three are largely just UGG-booted recipients of Alex’s one-boy guerilla war. Still, they’ve got what any self-respecting Home Alone villain needs — a solid cartoonish wince of pain.
The Traps: And pain they receive: Unlike the relatively shorter sequences in the first two films, it feels like nearly the entire latter half of Home Alone 3 is dedicated to an escalating host of borderline-homicidal homemade booby traps. Alex plays switcheroo with his trampoline and frozen backyard pool; he sets up dumbbells and flower pots; there’s even more than one avenue for the intruders to straight-up electrocute themselves. (He’s lucky that the running lawnmower he jury-rigs only gives his target a severe haircut; he could be up on murder charges.)
Is It Any Good? As these things go, Home Alone 3 is a solid entry in the series; Hughes is still at the pen, and God help him Linz is just too cute to deny. The film’s early acts, in which the burglars make their way through the street breaking into homes to look for the chip, turn Alex into an erstwhile Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, constantly trying to warn his parents and the authorities of the threat on their street only to be dismissed as an attention-seeking kid. (“Excuse me for being a good citizen!” he squeaks.)
Not only that, the film’s higher stakes makes the extended series of booby-trap pranks all the more palatable. After all, this kid isn’t just getting his rocks off inflicting pain on adults: He’s saving the world, damnit. Roger Ebert, the madman, even argued that it was the best of the series to date: “To my astonishment, I liked the third Home Alone movie better than the first two.”
