Lights out in 'Home Alone 3' without Macaulay Culkin
By Stevie Emilia
JAKARTA (JP): John Hughes' Home Alone 3, set for local theaters this Christmas, is yet more confirmation that sequels are not necessarily equals of their successful predecessors.
This is not only due to the absence of Macaulay Culkin, star of both previous efforts which had combined grosses of US$833 million worldwide and are the only comedies among the 10 highest box office grossers of all time. Simply put, it is because the third entry in the series is a pale, tired copy of the first plot of the child left home alone as a gang of thieves descends.
The difference here is that eight-year-old Alex. D. Linz, the replacement for Culkin, now a grown-up 17,, has to defend not only his home, but also his neighborhood from members of an international crime syndicate instead of bumbling burglars.
Like the two previous blockbusters, Hughes again serves as the creative mind and producer behind Home Alone 3 where he unites with seasoned film editor Raja Gosnell.
This marks Gosnell's directorial debut, replacing Chris Columbus from the earlier films.
Linz, who costarred with Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney in the romantic comedy One Fine Day and made his debut in Jim Carrey's comedy Cable Guy, is inevitably pressured in the part of Alex Pruitt to make people forget the angelic looks and lovable hijinks of Culkin.
The latter, the highest paid child star in Hollywood history with an estimated fortune of $17 million, has not appeared in a movie since 1994's Richie Rich and Getting Even With Dad due to the usual adolescent problems and the hostile divorce of his parents.
The story centers on the disappearance of a computer chip containing top-secret U.S. defense plans, which was smuggled inside mechanical components of the toy car by a quartet of international thieves at Hong Kong's airport.
The toy was accidentally picked up by Alex's grumpy neighbor, Mrs. Hess, played by Tony Award-winning stage actress Marian Seldes.
The chip is worth $10 million on the black market, and the quartet, led by spiffy but deadly foreigner, Petr Beaupre (Olek Krupa), tracks it down from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and finally to the Chicago suburb of North Devon Park.
Pretending to be the Pruitt's new neighbors, the bad guys search for the chip from house to house armed with their high- tech gadgets.
Linz is like an adult in a kid's body, able to figure out by himself that the criminals are looking for the chip inside his toy car and checking its ID number before calling the U.S. defense department to report his finding.
Krupa, featured in 9 1/2 Weeks, Eraser and Fair Game, and his band of criminals are no match for Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern as Harry and Marv in the previous films.
Encounter
How Alex gets the chip stretches the bounds of feasibility, but it is still tolerable. Harder to fathom is how a child with chicken pox is left untended by his parents, played by Haviland Morris (Sixteen Candles, Who's That Girl) and Kevin Kilner (Switch, The Stoned Age), and two obnoxious older siblings, scaled down from the five in the earlier movies.
The story may be entertainingly predictable, but it is still hard to see a sick child, his Einstein brain functioning fine, putting savvy criminals through an obstacle course of falls, crashes and slams.
Those pratfalls were designed by veteran stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell (Dante's Peak, Waterworld). Academy Award-winning production designer Henry Bumstead (Vertigo, The Sting) created the Pruitt attic, where Linz sets up his command post while plotting the downfall of the bad guys, and the backyard swimming pool.
Children might be amused watching another child beating the bad guys with the help of his pet rat and a babbling parrot even though the criminals are no different from ones in corny Indian movies: they never die no matter how hard you hit them.
For mature viewers, it is hard to digest that a boy -- no matter how clever he is -- can outwit criminals armed with guns and surveillance equipment.
Despite all the foul play, Hughes still manages to include some heart-warming moments, in the same vein as when Mac cheered up the lonely old man, Robert Blossoms, in the first Home, and his friendship with the Pigeon Lady, Brenda Ficker, in the second.
This time, Alex softens Mrs. Bess' hard edge when he rescues her after she was tied up in the freezing cold.
Hughes tried to remove the weighty sequel tag from his film by casting a brand new cast of characters for the family.
He even filmed a modest Tudor-style home in Chicago instead of the million-dollar mansion in Winnetka, Illinois, from the earlier movies.
These efforts were futile because Home Alone 3 faithfully follows the formula of the previous films, with little new to offer. This will probably not faze the children to whom this is targeted, but the same cannot be said for the adults who might be forced to accompany them.