Rating: 1.5 / 5
The McCallister family wants to fly to Florida during the upcoming vacation. At the airport there is a mix-up with Kevin (Macauley Culkin) following a man whom he mistakenly takes for his father. All of a sudden Kevin finds himself in New York and settles in the Plaza Hotel under the receptionist Mr. Hector (Tim Curry). To make matters worse, the two gangsters Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) have broken out and seek revenge.
What may sound like a good premise for a funny and original film is in truth a convulsive description of a film that already exists. Yes, John Hughes and Chris Columbus actually managed to create the second part of their original film Kevin home alone to copy exactly. It’s the same gags and the same pseudo-bizarre characters. This form of copying is so thirty that you have created the same finale as in the first part.
But while the first had at least a few bright spots in interaction with Kevin and his family. And the starting point for the film still sprayed at least a little logic, there is no trace of it in the sequel.
The very fact that Kate McCallister (Katherine OHara) is put through such hurdles to get her son back at all is so ridiculously constructed that it is almost enough for the only joke in the film. In addition, the widespread disease sequellitis joins. As a rule, the symptoms do not show up slowly, but are there immediately and somehow no longer averted: higher, faster, further. What in German means something like “longer, the same gags and more embarrassing”, takes on a level of thirty here that the patient cannot be helped any more.
So right at the beginning even one-to-one scenes from the first part are recreated, so that you can no longer distinguish which film you are currently in. But the culmination of it all is not even the cameo of my favorite egocentric flat whistle, but the really shameful gags. Tim Curry really indulges in underground bad gags. Homophobic crap, which you don’t always use with the pseudo-agrument “Yes, that used to be normal.” can dismiss. It’s not funny. That’s just unpleasant.
And while we are already dealing with problems, another one has crept back into the film, which should not go unmentioned. The violence. I have already explained this in detail elsewhere. So I’ll be brief: the violence offers no distance, no aesthetics and is just uncomfortable. And maybe it is due to the overall impression of the film, but while I could at least praise Culkin myself in the first part, everything original and fresh has disappeared from his play. But that’s probably no wonder, he always had to shoot the same film twice in a row.
This film is actually a bottomless cheek. Fortunately for him, I’ve seen much worse films, so that at least I didn’t have the feeling that my brain cells were burning away again. But still the makers don’t seem to have understood why Kevin home alone was a success at all, and just filmed the same script with the continuation sickness again. An outrage.
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