Starring: Macaulay
Calkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern & Catherine O’Hara
Director: Chris
Columbus
Producer: John Hughes
Writer: John
Hughes
Music By: John
Williams
Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals!
My favourite Christmas movie ever – I know, most people
prefer the original to the sequel – has Kevin McAlister (Calkin) at the centre
of another McAlister family travel stuff-up, and this time he is in the Big
Apple at Christmastime, and so are his old foes, the Wet Bandits. Marv (Stern)
and Harry (Pesci) have managed to escape from prison, and have reinvented themselves
as the Sticky Bandits.
The fact that Kevin now has the entirety of New York City to
play with makes Home Alone 2 funnier than the first, because the possibilities are
endless, and some of New York’s most famous locations – Rockefeller Centre,
Central Park, Carnegie Hall and even the World Trade Centre Towers, depending
on what version you watch – get a run as Kevin continues to outwit Marv and
Harry. And earn the grudging respect of his family again, after being on the
outer after punching his brother, Buzz, at a Christmas pageant.
Because of a power outage at the McAlister home in Chicago,
Kevin and his family are running late for a flight to their holiday destination – again. And Kevin isn’t
happy with their holiday destination, wanting to go somewhere other than Miami, somewhere where there are
Christmas trees rather than palm trees – and, following a man he thinks is his
father, ends up on a plane to New York City, arriving at LaGuardia
International Airport, in disbelief.
Kevin has his father’s credit card, and manages to rent a
room at the exclusive Plaza Hotel, where he must outwit the suspicious desk
attendant (Tim Curry) and a young bellhop (Rob Schneider), in between getting
directions to the lobby from the one and only Donald Trump. He also finds out
that the Sticky Bandits are planning to rob Duncan’s Toy Chest, and after being
chased from his hotel when his father’s credit card is cancelled, Kevin must use
his uncle’s partly-renovated house, amongst other places, to trap and defeat
Marv and Harry. He receives some timely assistance from an old park dweller
(Brenda Fricker), who loves pigeons, and is clearly the sequel’s equivalent of
Old Man Marley.
Meanwhile, Kevin’s family are en route from Miami to the Big
Apple, and his mother decides to go out looking for him. Like the original,
despite the amount of comedic violence throughout, the ending is warm and happy,
with the bad guys defeated, and the entire extended McAlister family residing
in a mammoth suite inside the Plaza Hotel for Christmas morning, with a
truckload of presents.
Some of the great bits from the first film are duplicated
here, but not in a way that makes it boringly repetitive. The scene where Kevin
uses a videotape of the ‘Angels With Filthy Souls’ “sequel” to convince the
hotel staff that there’s a madman with a gun loose – “I believe you, but my
Tommy Gun don’t – is hilarious, as is the scene where a blow-up toy and a handheld
cassette recorder called a ‘Talkbox’ is used to scare Tim Curry’s character out
of the room that is purportedly occupied by Kevin and his father. The booby
traps are bigger and better than before.
John Williams’ score is a good here as it was in the
original, and a song written by Steve Van Zandt, “All Alone on Christmas” was
released as a single, sung by Darlene Love and backed by Van Zandt and the rest
of the E Street Band, is probably my favourite Christmas song. The promotional video
features Macaulay Calkin riding on the shoulders of Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons
during the epic sax solo in the middle of the song.
Despite negative reviews – that I don’t understand – Home Alone 2: Lost In New York was a major box office success, taking $31.1 million USD on opening weekend. The US boxoffice total was $173,585,516 with an international total of $358,994,850.
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