Home Alone is forever a fan favorite and often listed among the all-time great Christmas comedies. I hate to be a Grinch, but Chris Columbus’s film is no masterpiece, though it has charm to spare by the end. Oddly, the film’s opening act is its best and most adventurous even though people mostly remember the third act. I especially love the way these early interiors are shot from Kevin’s perspective: the chaos and powerlessness of childhood rendered almost expressionistically. More than once, I was reminded of Murnau’s The Last Laugh. The exaggerated movement, the towering adults, and the sheer sensory overload evoke a child’s-eye perspective that feels at once surreal and deeply familiar. The filmmaking in this section is energetic and inventive, setting the stage for what should be an equally engaging journey.
The ending, of course, is justifiably iconic. It explodes into an almost cartoonish slapstick symphony that defies physics, logic, and basic human durability. If you’re going to spend twenty minutes watching two grown men get systematically and sadistically dismantled by household objects, it helps when those men are played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Their chemistry and commitment to physical comedy elevate what could have been tedious sadism into a strangely joyful experience. There’s a reason this sequence remains burned into pop culture memory—it’s outrageously creative in its pain-delivery mechanisms, balancing cruelty with a near-Looney Tunes level of elasticity. If you’re going to watch a couple of hapless criminals get brutalized in increasingly elaborate ways, you could do a lot worse than these two.
However, everything in between these bookends sags under the weight of its own repetitiveness. It’s not just that the film has a predictable rhythm, but that it leans on the same beats and gags multiple times without variation. Conversations and jokes feel like they’re looping, not for emphasis but simply out of an obligation to fill time. The midsection drags, stretching what should be a zippy, tightly-wound premise into something baggy and overlong. I didn’t check the runtime, but I’d bet the actual home invasion sequence—the part everyone remembers—is packed into the final 10 to 15 minutes, meaning that a large chunk of the film is dedicated to setup that often feels redundant.
Much of this dead space is occupied by Catherine O’Hara’s subplot, which is less about entertainment and more about maintaining a sliver of plausibility. Her frantic journey home, while narratively necessary to justify the premise, never quite finds a compelling emotional or comedic groove—except, of course, for the scenes with John Candy, who, in a handful of minutes, injects warmth, humor, and effortless charm. The rest of her arc feels perfunctory, a way to make the eventual reunion land with a sentimental punch. But by that point, we’re already so deep into a heightened, kid-logic universe that realism is hardly a concern.
Culkin, to his credit, is better than expected, particularly in his moments of mischief. He carries the film with ease, his deadpan reactions and self-satisfied smirks making him more endearing than cloying. And if nothing else, John Williams’ score pulls everything together, lending even the slowest, most meandering sequences a sense of cohesion. Perhaps they should have let him edit the film, too.
Rating: ** 1/2 (out of 4)
