‘Home Sweet Home Alone’ — a bizarre retread with shifting alliances

Editor’s note: The author of this review saw the original “Home Alone” from 1990 and its sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” way too many times both as a kid and as an adult.

However you classify the new Disney Plus film “Home Sweet Home Alone” — be it a remake, a reimagining, a sorta-sequel, a needless nostalgia machine, etc. — it is definitely a fascinating, if not especially entertaining experiment.

Even in 1990, the original “Home Alone” had to spend quite a bit of time justifying the believability of its premise. How can a family just leave a kid home alone for several days? Now in the smartphone age, “Home Sweet Home Alone” sidesteps the logistical questions and instead focuses most of its runtime on humanizing the burglars.

The very funny Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney star as middle class parents on the verge of being forced to sell their family home in order to pay off some debts. While rummaging through their belongings, they discover a rare doll that could net them enough money to save the house. Then the doll goes missing, and long story short, they think a little rich boy named Max stole it.

Max, as played by “Jojo Rabbit” breakout Archie Yates, is the kid who eventually winds up home alone in his sprawling family estate. The movie spends surprisingly little time to set this event in motion, and despite a house full of other family members, only his mom (played Aisling Bea) gets more than two lines of dialogue here as she tries to get back home from Tokyo.

The McCallisters in the original movies were plenty wealthy too, but those movies made an effort to make Kevin (Macauley Culkin) sympathetic even when he wanted to make his family disappear forever. By comparison, the new film frames Max as a spoiled kid capable of stealing things from other people’s houses simply out of spite. For a while anyway, Max appears as the antagonist of “Home Sweet Home Alone,” and the “heroes” only want to burgle the boy’s house in order to take back something that already belongs to them.

Focusing this story on the burglars isn’t a bad idea on paper, and it helps that the movie mines the natural likability of Kemper and Delaney to justify their increasingly desperate, criminal behavior. It also undercuts some of the movie’s lazy references to the original movie so the entirety of “Home Sweet Home Alone” doesn’t constantly play out like a shadow of its predecessor (we already have that movie — it’s called “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York”).

Unfortunately, this approach crumbles once young Max sets his sprawling house full of booby traps. The burglars must suffer slapstick violence, because it’s a “Home Alone” movie. Even though Kemper and Delaney prove to be deft physical comedy performers, the whole sequence pushes too far into cringe.

Look, even a spoiled kid, petty thief or not, should be entitled to defend his own home from intruders, but the conflict between the two sides here could be resolved with a single, brief conversation. And yet the movie bends over backward to make sure that conversation can’t happen until the very end of the movie. Because traps must be set. Because burns, steep falls and concussions must be inflicted.

“Home Sweet Home Alone,” directed by Dan Mazer, contains several appearances by notable funny people, including Kenan Thompson, Jim Rash and Chris Parnell. None of them come across as real characters though; they just float in to deliver a couple of flat one-liners then exit the film.

One notable exception: Devin Ratray reprises his role as Buzz McCallister in what turns out to be an inspired bit of shared movie universe thread-building. Even then, his appearance relies on the audience already knowing his personality from the original movies.

Ultimately, “Home Sweet Home Alone” wants to make Max the ultimate hero of the story, a strange decision given how much he serves as a supporting player for two-thirds of the movie. Screenwriters Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell seem to be attempting some sort of commentary on class warfare, but it never clicks together in a meaningful way. Plus, why would you attempt such a thing in a reboot of “Home Alone” in the first place?

Perhaps audiences will admire the attempt at a fresh perspective, but “Home Sweet Home Alone” ultimately bails on that for the “Hero kid makes bad guys fall down” hijinks that the people demand. At least when Harry and Marv got nailed by swinging paint cans, you knew they deserved it.

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Tyler Wilson is a member of the International Press Academy and has been writing about movies for Inland Northwest publications since 2000, including a regular column in The Press since 2006. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.