Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back for my review of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York from 1992, also directed by Chris Columbus. I honestly don't have a whole lot to say in this intro, so let's get into the review because I have quite alot to say about this movie.

I don't understand why people like these first two movies so much. Maybe because I didn't grow up with either of them, being that I apparently saw the first movie on TV once when I was a kid, but I don't remember it, and I definitely never saw this one, so I haven't spent as much time with these two movies as I have Home Alone 3, which I'll be discussing next week.

First off, I would like to say that the entire cast is excellent in this movie. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are great as Harry and Marv, as they were in the first movie. While I don't like Kevin in this movie any more than I did in the first one, Macaulay Culkin still does an excellent job in the role. I'm also beginning to really love Catherine O'Hara as an actress, after having watched her in Beetlejuice, Home Alone, and now Home Alone 2. The greatest delight though was seeing Tim Curry as the Concierge of the Plaza Hotel...owned by a certain former American president, whose name I refuse to mention in this blog, ever. He shows up for a second in this movie too. 

While I've never seen the original adaptation of Stephen King's It, I mostly know Tim Curry as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island and as the voice of the villainous computer virus, Kilokahn in the Tsuburaya/DIC adaptation of Denkou Choujin Gridman, Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, the voice of Captain Hook in the Fox Kids animated series, Peter Pan & the Pirates, the voice of the villainous pipe organ, Forte in Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, and the voice of the mad scientist, Doctor Sevarius on Gargoyles, as well as the voice of Palpatine in seasons 5 and 6 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars after the death of original Palpatine voice actor, Ian Abercrombie in 2012.

Rob Schneider is also in this movie, but I've never been a fan of his. I mostly know him as supporting cast in Adam Sandler's early 2000s movies like Big Daddy, Mr. Deeds (my favourite), and Eight Crazy Nights, but otherwise I've never actually seen him in any movies outside of those three. He's fine in this movie, but, again, not my favourite.

My biggest problem with Home Alone 2 is that it's almost exactly the same as the first movie, just on a larger playing field. Like the opening scenes of the movie are a shot for shot remake of the first movie. And most of the trap gags in the final act are exactly the same as the traps in the first movie. With the exception of there being a hole in the floor right in front of Uncle Rob's front door. They even reference the first movie right out the gate too.

Another problem that I have with this movie is the fact that it takes place only a year after the events of Home Alone, but everyone is apparently two years older than they were in the previous movie. What? And even though they tried to make it look like Harry and Marv learned from the mistakes they made in the first one, and are anticipating everything Kevin is going to do, the kid still outsmarts them by a wide margin. 

The concept of this franchise is fine for a single movie, but it starts to break down when you try to expand it into more than one movie. Especially when you use the exact same cast of characters. It feels like an homage to the classic Abbott and Costello and The Three Stooges films, but at least Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges all had separate situations that they found themselves in. With this movie John Hughes and Chris Columbus just did the same thing they did in the first movie and that makes it boring. 

According to Wikipedia, the critics weren't as enamored with this movie as they had been with the first movie back in 1990. For the exact same reason that I don't like it very much. Despite this movie having a budget that was $10 million more than the first one, it made $117,689,825 less than the first movie did, so apparently the audience for the movie was much smaller for the movie than it was for the previous one. 

While I didn't grow up with Home Alone or Home Alone 2, I did play the NES game for Home Alone 2. When I was nine years old I had a nurse at school who had two kids, a daughter and a son, who were older than I was. She used to bring them over whenever she was looking after my brother, sister, and I, and while my nurse was busy with me, her kids would watch my siblings. There was this one time where my parents went out for the night and my nurse, and her kids, came over to look after us. Her son brought Home Alone 2 for the NES with him and we played that together for a bit. I mostly watched him play, but he let me try it before I went to bed.

Besides the game, my only other real interaction with this movie was the trailers and TV commercials for it back in 1992, and the home video re-release trailer for the first two movies on the VHS for Home Alone 3. I'm pretty sure that either Nana and Grandpa or my parents owned the first two movies on VHS, but obviously I didn't watch them, and I can't remember who owned them or when, I just remember seeing the cases somewhere and it was either at Nana's and Grandpa's place or at my house.

As you can tell, I didn't like Home Alone 2 at all. That doesn't mean that it's a bad movie or anything. It's just I wasn't as enthralled with it as I was the first movie. Of the first three movies in this series, My ranking of this series so far is Home Alone 3, Home Alone, and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Like I said, Tim Curry was the best part of this movie. If this was your first Home Alone movie, because you weren't old enough to see Home Alone in 1990, but you were old enough to see Home Alone 2 in 1992, great. But for me it wasn't great. 

That my friends is it for me for this week. I'm away all weekend so I won't be posting anything until Tuesday as Monday is my birthday, so I'm taking the weekend off. But, I will be back next week for more reviews and blog posts. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.