MOVIE REVIEW: HOME ALONE 4: TAKING BACK THE HOUSE (2002)

If they thought five years was long enough for us to forget how disappointing Home Alone 3 was, they were wrong. To make matters worse, I didn’t have a five-year gap between this TV-movie and the last one. My family watched all six Home Alone movies in the span of a Christmas season. Watching this so soon after probably compounded the misery I’m about to convey to you.

The McCallisters are back! Well, sort of. Kevin regressed in age and is nine, two of his siblings no longer exist, and his parents are in the process of finalizing a divorce because his father became a big shot with a rich girlfriend who hobnobs with foreign heads of state. Kevin elects to spend Christmas with his dad, but the girlfriend is a damper on their holiday traditions and fun. On top of this, Kevin sees an old nemesis casing the house. Even though it’s not his home, and he's usually not alone, Kevin springs into action to stop the bad guys.

Where the third movie was Home Alone in name and formula only, Home Alone 4 takes all the ingredients that were missing in 3, corrupts just about all of them, and tries to pass it off as entertainment with a sappy third-reel movie-of-the-week twirl. Instead of Kevin learning a lesson about the importance of family, however much they may drive you crazy, he’s just a smart kid showing all the adults who don’t believe him that he’s right.

It's a close race, but I have to say that the writing holds the movie back more than the acting. The script is among the laziest of cliché-ridden bores that I have witnessed in some time. I wonder what this might have looked like had it not needed to be hacked down to an 84-minute runtime for TV. The way the film ends is more smarmy and irritating than heartwarming, even if it does bring the family all back together.

But let’s not give the cast too big of a pass here. Once again, the poor child star pales in comparison to Macaulay Culkin. The timing, charm, and delivery just aren’t there. In the first two films, Kevin’s father had heart. Here he’s all doof, part of which is the actor’s fault (but again, he only had so much to work with). The real crime here, however, is ‘Marv.’ French Stewart was funny on 3^rd Rock From the Sun, where he played an alien pretending to be human, but his performance here more closely resembles that of an alien pretending to be a human actor. It’s a poor caricature of Daniel Stern’s work in the first two films, and it actually gets Marv’s personality all kinds of wrong.

As a TV-movie, Home Alone 4 was always doomed to be inferior simply because that was the nature of the medium in 2002. We are spoiled these days with quality of limited-run series and even some of the streaming-only movies that exist. I don’t know if that would matter for this film, had it been made today. It needs a better script and a better cast. This is what you get when you try to resurrect an already tarnished brand on the cheap and it shows. It betrays the spirit of the original film and wastes your time simultaneously. That’s not something anyone involved in a production wants to be associated with.

FINAL RATING: 1.5 out of 5