Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)Director: Chris Columbus
Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Tim Curry, Rob Schneider
Sat down in front of the TV to eat dinner tonight and Channel 7 had a Sunday night movie double starting with Home Alone 2. I’m not quite sure why they had it on given that technically it is a Christmas movie and the season for Christmas movies finished a couple of weeks ago, but I thought why not, I’ll give it a look.
If you haven’t seen it, Home Alone tells the story of Kevin McCallister, a young boy accidentally left home alone when his family goes on holidays. Through a series of ingenious booby-traps Kevin defends his home from a pair of burglars. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is pretty much the same film, except this time Kevin has managed to get on the wrong flight and land in New York on his own and rather than protecting his own home he is protecting the money being collected for a children’s charity at Duncan’s Toy Chest.
There isn’t a lot to say about this movie, but I will say this; watching this film again a few years down the track (almost 20 years, wow) you really do gain an appreciation for what a special talent Macaulay Culkin was. I say was like he is dead, he’s not, but puberty pretty much destroyed his career. There have been plenty of prominent child actors since who have been far superior actors, people like Haley Joel Osment, Dakota Fanning, Abigail Breslin, but where Culkin stood out is that he was a genuine star. None of the child actors we’ve seen since have had the same X-factor that he had. Not only did he have a certain type of charisma which enabled him to carry a movie, he had an onscreen persona which he carried from film to film (he was the same kind of wise cracking kid in Uncle Buck and Getting Even with Dad). The closest thing we’ve seen to Culkin is probably the Olsen twins or Miley Cyrus, both of whom established their careers in television before attempting a movie career.
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