MOVIE REVIEW: HOME ALONE: THE HOLIDAY HEIST (2012)
The Baxter family just moved across the country from California to Maine. Their children spend more time on their phones and video games than they do out in the fresh air, and the kids both agree that the new house is kind of creepy. While young Finn Baxter is freaked out about the local ghost stories about his new home, a trio of bandits have their sights on the home, believing it to contain a hidden room with a valuable painting inside. The thieves move in on the house on a night when the children are there alone while their parents are at a company Christmas party. Finn must use a little ingenuity to ward off the bad guys.
While a Home Alone sequel will never be Home Alone without Macaulay Culkin, I appreciate the back-to-basics approach to this film. One complicating factor in the success of this and any future Home Alone movie is the state of 21st Century technology. Cell phones are ubiquitous, and home security systems make a burglar's calling much more difficult. It’s not just ‘cut the phone lines and kill the power’ anymore. This movie works around some of that having the lone cell phone in the house locked in a secret basement room with the older sibling (no signal), and the family being so new to the neighborhood that the Baxters don’t have any connections yet to check in on their kids while they’re at the Christmas party.
The film infuses some gaming culture into the mix, which may or may not work for you, depending on where you fall on the continuum of embracing video gaming. My family doesn’t play video games, so I saw the utility of what they tried to do, but I’m not on board with elevating video gamers to a heroic level like they are here. Finn has a ‘friend’ named Simon that he plays multi-player online games with. They’ve never met, and Simon is an adult (stereotypically living in a tiny single-man-with-no-life style apartment), but he is concerned enough when Finn informs him of the burglar situation that he finds ways to alert Finn’s parents and the authorities.
As for the villains, I was shocked to see both Malcolm McDowell and Debi Mazar reduced to such lightweight characters. McDowell plays Sinclair, the leader of the team, who has more reasons than just money for wanting the painting hidden inside the Baxter’s home. The dialogue between and the behavior of the bandits is the best since Home Alone 2. They’re not too serious nor over the top, but they do make enough poor decisions to not be fully believable. While there is good sibling chemistry between the young actors playing the Baxter children, they don’t rise above TV-movie-tier acting. Maybe it’s wrong of me to dock them for that, but the name Home Alone raises the bar for our expectations.
The booby traps and physical comedy on display are both improvements over the last two films. Many of the traps Finn sets for the bad guys are simple, hearkening back to the original. The filmmakers wisely chose not to try to escalate and outdo the traps of prior films. While some may border on retread territory, it also impairs suspension of disbelief to a lesser degree. There are a few unlikely or improbable set pieces, but they only hop over the line of believability rather than traversing it Evel Knievel style.
Will The Holiday Heist become a Christmas staple? No, but it’s a welcome (though flawed) improvement over the last two. Maybe this is a sign that there is hope for a slightly above average sequel in the future. We don’t really need one, because we’ll always have the first two movies, but you know that won’t stop Hollywood’s thirst for finding more money without coming up with a new, original idea.
FINAL RATING: 2.25 out of 5
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