What is the Worst Christmas Movie Ever? CC2K Debates

Home Alone 3 – by Phoebe Raven

The first two instalments of the Home Alone franchise were huge box office hits and propelled Macaulay Culkin to stardom and being the highest-paid child actor ever. But as usual, trying to cash in on a successful franchise with sequel after sequel doesn’t pay off. Even though the production team remained mainly the same, Home Alone 3 is a disaster among films that call themselves family comedies, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to stand alongside such classic Christmas masterpieces as Home Alone and Lost in New York.

Let me list all the things wrong with Home Alone 3 before I try to come up with any kind of a defense for it in the light that Home Alone 4 even exceeds 3’s failures:

Issue #1:

Home Alone 3 has nothing whatsoever to do with the previous instalments of the franchise. Yes, it is still a kid battling bad guys by tricking out his house, but that is it. The family the movie is centred around aren’t the McCallisters, the bad guys aren’t Harry and Marv and they aren’t even burglars. The new family we are now supposed to care about are the Pruitts: three kids, a dad that is hardly featured in the movie at all and an overworked mom, who has the same red hair as Mrs. McCallister. This family still lives in Chicago, but that’s about where the similarities end. We have come to care about the McCallisters though. The tight wad Uncle Frank, the incontinent Fuller, the bully Buzz and naturally the darling rug rat Kevin. Zap all that and insert the oldest Pruitt kid, who is a cheap rip-off of Buzz but not nearly as mean or menacing, add a sister without any personality, played by none other than Scarlett Johansson, stack an incompetent father on top, who can’t even remember to put on pants and leaves the film after fifteen minutes to go to Cleveland and already this spells disaster. Furthermore, the new kid we are supposed to care about is cute enough to feature in a family comedy, but not endearing enough to carry a movie by himself. Also, he is given way too many unnecessarily long lines and monologues that make it painfully obvious we are watching a child trying to act. At least part one and two had the wits to avoid this as much as possible.

Issue #2:

Home Alone 3 is no longer a Christmas movie. Though the season is winter and a snow storm is featured in the movie’s plot, Christmas decorations or the holiday spirit play no part whatsoever. It takes away considerably from the warmth and heart-plucking the first two movies delivered and leaves the viewer as cold as those two evil guys who fell into the pool.

Issue #3:

Granted, realistic happenings weren’t the fabric of either Home Alone or Lost in New York, but Home Alone 3 takes unrealistic to a new level. It starts with the evil guys the kid is fighting. They are terrorists trying to get a computer chip to North Korea that will enable a nuclear missile. I could believe Kevin battling two dumb-witted burglars, but an eight-year-old battling FOUR terrorists, who are large scale criminals with high-tech equipment? Sorry, my suspension of disbelief just went out the window.

And then there are all kinds of little things that just set of the alarms for unrealistic. A parrot that talks more eloquently than a ten-year-old and can light a match, a toy car that leaps a ten foot gap, a little kid hoisting a barbell two grown men are too weak to lift and a boss that makes the mom come to work when her kid has the chicken pox. None of this makes any sense and it is too much to ignore.

Add to this the fact that our highly organized and gadget-wielding terrorists turn into blubbering fools when faced with a kid and you’ve got me groaning in discomfort. One terrorist takes pictures with a camera hidden in his glove, but he is freaked at a little cold water spraying him in the face. The terrorist woman can do a triple back flip, but running while pushing a stroller is too much for her.

Issue #4

There are too many bad guys in Home Alone 3. The gang of terrorists consists of three men and a woman and this gives the movie far too much ground and mishaps to cover. In part 1 and 2 the viewer knew Harry and Marv, one of them slightly more stupid than the other, and always bickering amongst themselves. In Home Alone 3 there is no room to really give any of the terrorists a profile. The leader is supposed to be menacing, but there is no time to establish that. The other two guys are exact copies of one another. And the woman is so blatantly the most foolish of them all it borders on offensive to women.

Alex being able to fight on four fronts at once, again, is highly unrealistic. Kevin only fought against two people and those even united halfway through the battle, so Kevin could hit both with one strike. This never happens in Home Alone 3 and it takes away the focus and drive a silly comedy should have. The mishaps and accidents just keep going on forever, one more ridiculous than the other and by the end you just find yourself bored by the terrorists’ struggles, because none of the actors have the comedic skill to sell the silly slapstick stunts.

Issue #5

For all the elements Home Alone 3 didn’t pick up from the first two instalments, there are a few it does copy and it does so in a very predictable way. Once again the evil guys get electrocuted like Marv in Lost in New York and their screams sound exactly like the one Marv let out. You see that coming a mile down the road. Once again a slightly unusual pet plays a part in winning the battle, but a rat is not nearly as gross as the tarantula from part 1, and also it is so clichéd to have the female terrorist phobic of rats.

There are a few elements Home Alone 3 should have used from the previous movies to reach success. Kevin’s clever use of snippets from B-movies to distract the bad guys is one such thing. Another would have been to keep the context of Christmas so the trademark Home Alone theme could have been used. The way Home Alone 3 is scored now is simply boring and uninspired, when in part 1 and 2 music was such a big factor for success.

For all the issues I have with Home Alone 3, there is one aspect to the story I found witty and entertaining. The Pruitts live in the suburbs of Chicago and the lead terrorist cleverly remarks the best time to break into houses in the suburbs is during the day, because then nobody is home. How could he know that Alex has the chicken pox and is therefore forced to stay home? This is a clever twist on the previous twist of Kevin being left behind or lost by his family. In Home Alone 3 Alex’s family isn’t out of town or out of the country, they are simply at work or at school, but it still puts him in danger and has him face off with evil all on his own.

This is the only story element I found fresh, innovative and believable. It would have been stale to simply have Alex get lost without his family again like Kevin before. If only John Hughes and his crew had taken this idea and gone somewhere more entertaining with it, they could have had another hit.

Again, in short, my take on how to make this one a hit: stick to the Christmas theme, have no more than two bad guys – who are not high-scale terrorists – and get rid of the ridiculously smart and able parrot. Ideally you should also have a child actor as talented as Macaulay Culkin and a mother a little more comically talented than that actress featured here, but it’s not a must if all you want to create is some family fun for the holidays. The way Home Alone 3 was made though, I doubt kids even enjoy it. It’s a pity the good name of Home Alone had to be blemished like this and then blown away by Home Alone 4.

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