My 100 Worst Movies of the 90's - 28 - Home Alone 3 (1997)

Home Alone 3 (1997; Twentieth Century Fox)

Home Alone was a passable and pretty fun, albeit sadistic, family movie from 1990.  It made Macaulay Culkin a star and was the written by John Hughes, who wrote many of the best teen dramas and comedies of the 80’s.  In the 90’s he began writing and directing films aimed at families and younger audiences and throughout the decade the works got progressively worse.  Things hit rock-bottom in 1997 with Home Alone 3, one of the stupidest cinematic displays ever to hit the silver screen.

In this direct-to-video-quality film, Max is sick and stays home and his parents leave him there.  Yep.  So apparently some remote controlled car he was given as payment by a disturbed old woman has some sort of weapons chip inside of it (WHAT!?!?!?!?!) and so now a team of mercenaries storm his neighborhood in search of the missing chip.  I really can’t make a joke about this, that summary should speak for itself.

Home Alone 3 is one of the dumbest, most desperate, most frustratingly bad films I have ever sat through.  When this movie hit theatres I was already much older than its target audience, but they could have at least had the courtesy to make this film bearable!  Countless pratfalls laced with cartoon sound effects flood each scene.  Characters mug and make silly faces right before something falls on them or they fall on something.  We see a shot of Max saying something that I think was meant to be funny then it all happens over and over again.  

The fact is, Home Alone is a comedy that did not need a sequel.  It was hardly a masterpiece, but at least it was watchable.  I sat through the first Home Alone years later and didn’t find it that bad, I think it actually kind of holds up, though it is still kind of a sick movie (I’m convinced that kid grew up to be Jigsaw, I know this to be true).  Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was bad; I hated it.  However, it sucked for the same reason the Hangover: Part II sucked, it was the exact same movie recycled to make money.  Home Alone 3 shows no connection whatsoever (aside from the title) to the original two films.  Even the family name is different.  This tells me that the only reason this film was written was to cash in on the Home Alone franchise and do so without the series’ star.  In order to do that I guess that they had to rewrite instead of recast, but that doesn’t explain the live-action cartoon that was the result of this utterly unnecessary exercise!