HOME ALONE 2: LOST IN NEW YORK 1992
32%
Directed by Chris Columbus
Written by John Hughes
Starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard, Tim Curry, Brenda Fricker
Synopsis
They did it again: in a rush to make their flight to Miami, the McCallisters lose eight-year-old Kevin in O’Hare airport, leaving him to accidentally board a flight to New York City. At first, being not-at-home alone is a dream—Kevin checks into the Plaza and goes toy shopping—but soon he realizes that the same bandits he fended off a year ago are also walking the streets of Manhattan.
Why We Love It
For their sequel to their holiday smash Home Alone, writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus were careful not to tinker too much with a very successful formula. In fact, save for the titular change in location, Home Alone 2 is… Home Alone all over again. There’s a chaotic airport scene, not one but two penny-dropping “Kevin!” screams, another scary-but-ultimately-lovely Boo Radley type, and, of course, plenty of slapstick violence directed at the Wet Bandits, now going by the “Sticky Bandits.” For some, the change in setting wasn’t enough to shake a dull sense of déjà vu; for others, especially kids who dreamed of a Kevin McCallister–style adventure, it was like a second helping of ice cream. In bed. With no pesky parents around.
The circumstances that place Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) in New York City for the sequel are ridiculous—a pile-up of gross parental neglect, airline oversight, and wild coincidence. The writers’ work in these early scenes is as strained as one of Kevin’s Rube Goldberg–like torture devices. And yet, once we get to Manhattan, the film takes off, largely because Home Alone 2 absolutely nails the elements that it carbon-copies from the original. There’s a wonderful sequence involving Kevin’s cassette recorder that’s lifted almost wholesale from the first movie, but no less funny because of it, and the “Pigeon Lady” (Brenda Fricker)—an at-first terrifying figure Kevin meets in Central Park—has a story arc that’s every bit as sweetly moving as Old Man Marley’s. Kevin’s climactic showdown with the bandits in an abandoned Upper West Side brownstone feels more sinister than in the original, partly because he’s on the offense: he’s not defending his home this time; he’s lured them here.
John Williams’s memorably schmaltzy score, with a few new thematic additions, is excellent throughout.
Home Alone 2 does more than just rehash, though: it takes the thing that spoke to every kids’ heart in Home Alone—the fantasy of having the house to yourself—and expands on it, providing audiences with the Big-like fantasy of having the greatest city in the world as your playground. Every nineties kid remembers living vicariously through Kevin as he explored a mega toy store, rang up wild room service bills in a fancy hotel, jaunted through Central Park, and made fools of a set of cartoonish big-city adults.
The movie also turns out to be a loving tribute to New York itself. The filmmakers could have played up the more sinister side of the city—this was pre-Giuliani and before the Disneyfication of Times Square—and yet they only hint at its darker corners, leaning instead into the excitement, hope, and sense of community for which the city is famous. This is a New York not just of muggings and porno theaters, but a city in which an eight-year-old can get by on his own just fine. A city in which he can stand atop a still-standing World Trade Center tower and gleefully imagine the many adventures that await below.