A low point in western civilization

Rating: Null/10 (23 August 2000)

If he's lost in New York, then how exactly is he home alone? Well never mind that. I'm bothered that the filmmakers were so in love with their first Alone movie, that they decided to carbon copy it for the sequel. It's the same film in every respect, only now it features New York. What concerns me is the danger of having Home Alone become a formula, where people start pitching ideas to studios like "Home Alone... on a bus"
Actually, forget all that. All that concern fades away instantly when one considers the real problem here, which is that it seems that Hell is actually exporting feature length films for American release. How this deal was negotiated I can never know, but the unavoidable fact is that we now have a horrifying window into the land of the forsaken.
I always wondered what endless torture would look like. How, for example, could one be violently beaten and killed and then instantly resurrected for another session? Look no further than the scene where Joe Pesci and the other guy fall through three stories of a building and then get up for more. They proceed to get beaten, clubbed, smacked, skinned, burned, and walloped in a manner that would make Moe, Larry and Curly beg for humanity's forgiveness.
Or take for instance the scene outside the building, where Culkin, looking just as sweet and angelic as he did in the last scene of Jacobs Ladder, proceeds to lob brick after brick off the roof, where they plummet five stories and hit the burglar in the face, again and again, and again. Now I've become fairly desensitized to violence over years of TV and movie watching, but having to watch this lesson in cruelty, being so diabolically presented as banana-peel slapstick and a bad guy getting what's coming to him, just made my skin crawl.
Is there any worse fate than a cherub faced boy throwing brick after brick down at you, and no matter what you do, each one will hit you full force in the face? If you've ever wanted to see what this might actually look like, it's all in Home Alone 2.
The final scare here is that the other people here who have reviewed the movie have generally liked it but warned everyone to stay away from Home Alone 3, which apparently is very bad.