Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)

[darrellmaclaine]

Originally Posted by jess1581

Still think Home Alone 2 woulda been better if the hotel staff were the antagonists with Tim Curry and Rob Schneider. Forget the totally contrived reheated bandits.

Last time I watched it (last Christmas with my daughter at the cinema) I realised this was clearly the original intention, and that Harry and Marv must have only been added later. It makes so much more sense when you think of the hotel as the potential venue for all the traps, and the "I *love* you!" scene with the VHS tape must be a remnant from the original script. As it is, the film spends all its time establishing the Plaza as the "home" of the title... then moves into a random stranger's house.

How the bird woman and Duncan's Toy Chest would have fitted in I'm not sure, but it would be improved by taking the Sticky Bandits out. They don't even play the characters anywhere close to the same anyway.

This was what I wrote in December on Letterboxd, which I stand by:

Millionth time of seeing this over the last 30+ years, but the first ever in a cinema, to which I took my daughter, another fan of this two-film franchise that stopped here and was never heard of again. Officer.

I think the original is essentially a perfect film, so the sequel could only ever be a victory lap, and it does that with ease. What hit me with some clarity this time was its major underlying problem and how it could have been fixed. The things that work best in Home Alone 2 are the new elements - the flourescent Eddie Bracken in his toy shop, Brenda Fricker as a three-dimensionalised take on Jane Darwell's Mary Poppins "little old bird woman" and, especially, Tim Curry and Rob Schneider's double act as venal Plaza Hotel employees - that "Angels With Even Filthier Souls" VHS routine standing as a transcendent piece of vaudeville (there's actually not a single scene in the Plaza that isn't a winner).

The weakest parts by far are the grim and fairly witless scenes with Harry and Marv and that climactic 'traps' sequence, the centrepiece of the original but which here is presented in a grim, dingy and resolutely un-Christmassy location, has no internal logic whatsoever (one of the traps is made by Marv himself! How is that part of a battle plan?!) and swaps the Chuck Jones-like narrative escalation of the first film's slapstick with a scattershot, momentum-less and often gratuitously nasty sequence of either explicit violent assaults, people and things falling down big holes (which is funny once but reoccurs without variation like a stuck record), or Daniel Stern wiping noxious substances from his eyes (which happens FOUR TIMES. FOUR). What's more, this time Joe Pesci is suddenly underplaying his character with a layer of grit and realism he never did the first time while Stern has decided to dial it up to pantomime levels, screeching and mugging like a cartoon character, so Harry and Marv barely seem to exist in the same universe. It's like watching Bob Hoskins act alongside Roger Rabbit.

Surely this film would have worked so much better if Kevin had uncovered a ploy by Tim Curry and Rob Schneider to rob Duncan's Toy Chest, and rather than an anonymous derelict house that appears only to service the plot, the entire chase and traps section could have taken place within the hotel itself, with all the opportunities for materials and locations to utilise, and lots of Frank Tashlin-style door jokes to boot, whilst still servicing the Brenda Fricker subplot and avoiding the need for that weird runaround at the end with Catherine O'Hara, the surly policeman and Kevin being at Rockerfella Plaza for no adequately seeded reason. The more one thinks this possibility through, it makes so much sense that it starts to seem... unlikely that it wasn't somehow originally the actual plan? Did Fox really think Pesci and Stern were 'the money'?

All that said, Lost in New York still brings me untold joy, still makes me laugh out loud, still makes me cry, and does not shame the original one iota. Chris Columbus remains a pariah in many circles (and you'll not find a good word about The Goonies from me), but both of his Homes Alone (and Mrs Doubtfire for good measure while we're at it) should really be at the 'postmodern critical reevaluation' stage by now. It's happened in recent years for some of the most crowdpleasing, once-sneered-at work of Jerry Lewis, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy, and indeed for plenty of John Hughes' other scripts in fact, so if we are in the universe where Tootsie can correctly take its place within the Criterion Collection, then we also really need to start talking about Home Alone and others as the serious artistic achievements they really are.