I’m shockingly surprisingly mixed on this new Home Alone movie. And, to be clear, I hate the Home Alone movies and, yes, that means I’m a mean old ogre Grinch Dracula monster who hates the first one. I think its both sadistic and cruel while being hypocritically sentimental… I may have some issues. I’ll admit it.

The new flick follows roughly the original’s structure – the kid gets accidentally left home alone, has fun, and then realizes someone is trying to break into his house. But the burglars are switched to a nice but desperate married couple who think the kid has stolen a priceless porcelain doll from them. They need the doll to actually keep the family home… but they have to be dummies who live in a Home Alone world so they decide to break in and have sadistic violence done to them. Seriously, I think some of these traps were in a Saw movie.

Kevin McCallister in the first movie was a sadist who enjoyed hurting burglars but you could tell he was supposed to be a good kid. But this new kid is a real asshole. Everything he does and says to his mom in the first act is hateable and unrelatable. It ain’t cute and it isn’t just something he says in the moment. And they basically make him the villain for having stolen the doll… but I’m not sure the script realize that.

The movie actually focuses more on the married couple/bandits. Yet this nice (if dopey) financially desperate couple are the ones we are meant to root against in the final act? Does not compute. I felt too much empathy for them even if they were doing wrong.

Ellie Kemper stars as the wife bandit and she’s simply the MVP of the movie. She is a really good physical comedian. She sells a lot of gags that somehow turn out funny when I should be (and sometimes was) cringing. She’s also the (random but kind of effective) source of the movie’s late-stage sentimentality. She can’t really save the whole movie but she really is putting in the work.

So… yeah… it’s on Disney+ if you have it and might be worth looking at? But probably not. It’s still an hour’s worth of uneven (and occasionally decent) comedy followed by some cruelty that is somehow sold well by Ellie Kemper doing the impossible.

Score: 69