Good in parts, but quite implausible

Rating: 6/10 (30 November 2018)

I enjoyed this movie when I was a kid. It was an original exciting premise, kid home alone struggling to do everything himself but also enjoying such freedom, and him getting the better over 2 bumbling burglars.
There was some amusing humor including the way the neighbor kid (who had a funny scene with the annoyed van driver) got counted as one of the crew so the family got the family count correct. That was the rooting cause of Kevin's family forgetting him, that combined with Kevin remaining asleep on the third floor where he got sent to the previous night due to him pushing his older brother Buzz for eating his cheese pizza. The other kids (Kevin's sister and his cousins) did not respect him, and his Uncle Frank had an intense dislike for him that was never fully explained other than him thinking how he's just a little brat. But the other kids were bratty too, so I'm guessing that Uncle Frank was just another bratty kid in a grownup's body who only wanted to go with popular opinion and dislike him just because the other kids also did.
The scenes of the family rushing through the airport and just barely making the plane were good, and I found it amusing with the kids running down the jetway and one of them calling "I got the window seat!" The scenes with Kevin discovering he was alone and smiling "I made my family disappear" was where reality really sorta flew out the window. A real 8 year old would've been scared right then, whether he had a fight with his family the previous night or not.
There were still some amusing scenes along the way with Kevin's antics around the house, him thinking the furnace in the basement is a monster, him going through his brother's stash, eating a big bowl of ice cream while watching the Grinch, and then him pretending to be the man of the house and putting on aftershave, thus leading to his famous hands on his cheeks scream. Alot of those are things an 8 year old would enjoy doing while home alone, that is if his family didn't mysteriously disappear without explanation and remain gone for days on end. That, like I said before, would've gotten a real 8 year old frightened. However, you could also view all of this as just the fantasy of an 8 year old, which is why the movie was quite popular at the time, and why I enjoyed it when I was young.
Also amusing was Kevin going grocery shopping with his conversation with the suspicious cashier. Also amusing was the scene of him asking a pharmacist if the toothbrush on sale was approved by the American dental association and not her or her boss knowing. That scene also has one of Kevin's run-ins with the rumored murderer neighbor Marley. This leads to another one of the movie's goofs when Buzz said at the beginning of the movie that Marley was a murderer who just didn't have enough concrete evidence to put him away. Yet later on when Buzz is talking to his and Kevin's sister in Paris about why he's not worried about Kevin being home alone, he says how they live on a street where absolutely nothing dangerous or criminal ever happens. I guess Buzz had forgotten then about Marley.
Other implausibilities include when Kevin's family in Paris discovering Kevin being left home, they cannot find one person they know back home in Chicago who could check on him. And, the police provide being useless too. After one of them is told on the phone by Kevin's mother that her 8 year old son has been abandoned, the officer repeats her request "you want me, to check on him, to see if he's ok?" as if it was a weird thing for a mother to ask when her 8 year old has been left alone and defenseless.
Kevin turns out not to be so defenseless though with Burglars Harry and Marv when he rigs a bunch of traps for them and defends his home. That's the most famous part of the movie, and also the most implausible and unrealistic. It never occurred to Kevin to just call the police. I guess that may also be due to the police in their town being useless, such as their reaction to Kevin's mother asking to check up on him. The police in Kevin's town being useless may explain why Kevin never heard from them when he got the pizza guy to think that there was a shooter in the house threatening him and causing him to run to his car all crazy freaked out. And due to the pizza guy's freaked out reaction, he believed that there was a real shooter in the house, he wasn't smart enough to realize that Kevin was only playing a movie with a shooting going on. Normally after something like that, the pizza guy would go to the police and they would then immediately come to the house.
Good movie in parts, but those gosh darn implausibilities.