Straining for our fondness and doing its best to try our patience on occasion, the film remains snappy and often funny enough in spite of its shortcomings.

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2012)

I didn't think George Romero's 1985 film Day of the Dead was the piece I was going to come away from Home Alone thinking about the most. Certainly, in terms of structure, there is that overriding sense of the first two thirds of the film acting as gentle 'filler' to the bigger picture; pleasant foundations easing into a final act arriving with such an explosion that when we watch it all unfold, we observe just how much craft and panache has been put towards it when placed up against mostly everything that preceded it. The respective sequences are, of course, when the undead run amok in what was up to that point a safe haven for the few remaining human beings left in the United States and that moment those two burglars in Chris Columbus' 1990 comedy Home Alone make it to the lead's house so as to ransack it.
Up to these respective points, we could be forgiven for misplacing that said films were necessarily either respective horror or comedy movies at all. In the case of the Romero movie, that was OK: we enjoyed the clash between those indebted to science and those not; between those with trying to learn and understanding beings initially alien to them and those wanting to round them all up and get rid of them as soon as possible. In comparison, the build up to Columbus' explosion of style, craft and third act circumstance into which you genuinely feel the most energy has been pumped contains a scene in which one of those typically overweight American police officers goofily slips on a stretch of ice as he chases after an infant accused of stealing a toothbrush. Ho hum.
In spite of this, Home Alone is a fairly resounding effort on the whole without really ever creeping above a certain threshold of meagerness. It is a child's film, for sure, and one they'll no doubt enjoy watching as the kid protagonist thwarts an array of grownups in both a physical and authoritarian sense. They'll sympathise with the lead and his marginalisation at the hands of uncles and brothers, and they'll respond to his predicament of actually being away from family members and parents whilst having to get by on one's own as the first and foremost source of adventure. Remarkably, the film works as well as it does from an adult perspective; child orientated goals aside, it is made with the best of intentions and competently enough in spite of the fact one can only hold a certain amount of sympathy for a young child wanting all the attention without getting it whilst disparagingly privy to a three storey house in a part of the world which always sees snow at Christmas time and with a family capable of affording expensive holidays to far off locales.
It is Macaulay Culkin playing Kevin McCallister, an infant boy stuck at home at Christmas time with his extended family on the eve of their big holiday away to Paris. Kevin is an outcast, and both frustrates and is frustrated by them. One line, as he stamps up and down on the landing, as he shouts: "When I grow up and get married, I'll finally be able to live alone!" captures his forthright but ignorant stance. After wishing them gone and he alone, the following morning sees a mad dash and a miscount resulting in the McCallister's halfway over the Atlantic and Kevin still in an attic convert. Cue a lot of shenanigans; a rush to get home to him and a passable framework to do with the lead's realising family are actually something to cherish. Proper antagonism arrives in the form of two burglars, Marv (Stern) and Harry (Pesci); a couple of crooks whose trademark is to fill the sinks of their victims and leave the taps on to induce flooding – rather humorously, they scope out neighbourhoods in a van kitted out to look like a plumbing company and as they 'toast' crowbars whilst spying the McCallister residence, an amusing cut to inside Kevin's house sees a TV cartoon broadcast depicting The Grinch: they are indeed out to wreck Christmas.
The various strands and subplots just about hang together; Kevin's mother's sub-Planes, Trains & Automobiles trek back home, complete with an eccentric John Candy figure, is kicked around for laughs but just feels like John Hughes paying homage to himself, while Kevin's integration with a road sweep, whose psychosis ends up being a lot more balanced than was initially established, allows Kevin to see things through more grounded eyes. The road-sweep and our lead share a scene in a church which, quite literally, sees the conclusion of Kevin's framework all but verbally confirmed whilst revealing what it is he's come to learn during this experience - the following fifteen minutes a part of the final twenty seeing the film make that aforementioned step up into a final act of second unit genre onslaught when Marv and Harry finally try to rob the McCallister house. Where the narrative is weak with the whole exercise sporadically feeling spineless, its lead carries the film in a surprisingly diligent manner whereas composer Williams finds a delicate place in between unnerving, on account of some theremin riffs during the opening as a small home is dwarfed by the film's ominous "Home Alone" title card, to reassuring and quite pleasant with a thoroughly competent score. Columbus keeps the thing cracking along at a brisk old rate, and while the wheels threaten to come off, it is actually somewhat of a relief overall that they do not.