"Home Sweet Home Alone" an unfunny and charmless gift for no one

Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)

As studios are inclined to do, they’ll take something you liked in the past and repackage it without trying too much. In the case of Disney+’s reboot “Home Sweet Home Alone,” everyone in front of the camera seems to be trying their hardest, but the material itself is such strenuously unfunny, lowest-common-denominator stuff that it all just feels cynical for existing. Whereas 1990's “Home Alone” has become a holiday staple and a kid’s how-to manual on how to resourcefully fend off pesky burglars, this regurgitated content lacks any of the original’s charm, seasonal comfort, or practical home-defense ideas. By trying to please both nostalgic adults with fan service and undiscriminating kids who don’t know a Harry from a Marv with painful slapstick, “Home Sweet Home Alone” is bound to please no one.

Director Dan Mazer (criminally responsible for 2016’s “Dirty Grandpa”) and “SNL” writers Mikey Day & Streeter Seidell take the basic blueprint of John Hughes’ original script and attempt to flip it. There’s still a boy left home alone, but this time, the “robbers” subbing for the Wet/Sticky Bandits are the more sympathetic figures with more screen time. Archie Yates, who was adorably funny as Jojo’s best friend in “Jojo Rabbit” but not so much here, plays a precocious 1o-year-old Brit named Max Mercer (Archie Yates). When his family forgets to do a headcount before their flight to Tokyo for Christmas, Max is the man of the house, just in time to be, sort of, robbed. As the first “Home Alone” began as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for every 10-year-old child, Max gets in his home-alone fun, but it's relegated to one montage. He reads his sister’s diary, dresses up in his father and mother’s clothes, surfs down the staircase on an ironing board . . . and (intentionally?) makes a “Scarface” nod with a mound of candy instead of cocaine.

The protagonists, however, are really Pam (Ellie Kemper) and Jeff McKenzie (Rob Delaney), a financially strapped couple with kids who are forced to sell their house. Because there needs to be an insultingly flimsy way to get these desperate albeit decent people into Max’s home, there’s a family heirloom—a creepy porcelain doll worth $200,000—that they need to get back to save their house. The McKenzies are only assuming Max has stolen it, and hey, misunderstandings happen. In what almost lends the movie a dash of weird edge, another contrivance has Max thinking the couple plans on kidnapping him and handing him off to a cheek-pinching old lady and her old lady friends (don’t ask). If only these characters knew how to communicate, but everyone is forced to act beneath their intelligence here.

While there are have been think pieces on how the original “Home Alone” was always sadistically violent (and could have led to Kevin McCallister growing up to be the Jigsaw Killer from the “Saw” movies), “Home Sweet Home Alone” is far more cluelessly mean-spirited. By shifting our sympathies more toward Pam and Jeff, watching Max inflict booby-trap pranks upon his would-be intruders doesn’t register the right tone or satisfaction. On their own, the booby traps are kind of cool, especially if a 10-year-old could actually craft them, but the violence is so bombastic and, again, Pam and Jeff aren’t like Harry and Marv; they don’t deserve this level of pain. (Honestly, Max’s creations are more reminiscent of the homicidal teen in 2017’s under-seen “Better Watch Out,” and that’s a problem.) It should go without saying that Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper are reliable comic performers, and despite the energy that they do bring when pratfalling off balconies and down icy driveways, they deserve so much better. There’s even a deep bench of comic actors—including Timothy Simons, Pete Holmes, Chris Parnell, Jim Rash, and Esther Povitsky—who barely make a mark (okay, Kenan Thompson gets an amusing bit as a realtor posing as a physical trainer).

Self-aware without being clever, "Home Sweet Home Alone" is a shining example of when wink-wink, nudge-nudge self-referencing in movies can clang terribly. In fact, the nadir comes early when the McKenzie fam is sitting at home and watching a sci-fi remake of the fictional gangster film “Angels with Filthy Souls” from the first “Home Alone” (“Keep the change, you filthy animal!”); then one of them goes, “I don’t know why they’re always trying to remake the classics. Never as good as the originals.” Talk about a self-own. It’s also not enough for Buzz McCallister (Devin Ratray) to show up as a neighborhood police officer and have his badge get a close-up; he also has to bring up his little brother, who now heads security systems, and deliver a few familiar words. Without being a completist and seeing the previous two Macaulay Culkin-free, in-name-only sequels—and Roger Ebert was right about the surprisingly good “Home Alone 3”—it can’t officially be confirmed that this is the death rattle of the entire series. Even without comparison, “Home Sweet Home Alone” is very much joyless and creatively bankrupt that perhaps well enough should have been left home alone. Disney, your reboot, woof!

Grade: D 

Disney+ released “Home Sweet Home Alone” (93 min.) to stream on November 12, 2021.