My Review of Home Alone 3 (1997)

 

Written by John Hughes

Directed by Raja Gosnell

Alex: "You're not gonna find me up there, you big, dumb, law-breaking knuckle-heads!"

Earl Unger/Alice/Burton Jernigan: "He's outside!"

Alex: " Recognize this?"

When a franchise is so successful but your main cast don't really want to do more, what the hell do you do? Do you let it rest and try your luck with something else or do you just get a group of new people in to effectively tell the same story, yet again?

While it should've been the former with this particular franchise, it definitely became a case of the latter as once again, a group of baddies find themselves getting royally outsmarted by a child. Looks like Kevin McAllister isn't the only bane for a baddie's plans.

This time around, it's a young boy named Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz) who has come down with the chickenpox and also a case of cabin fever when he spies on some rather suspicious looking people - Peter Beaupre (Olek Krupa), Alice Ribbons (Rya Kihlstedt), Burton Jernigan (Lenny Von Dohlen) and Earl Unger (David Thornton) enter his neighbourhood looking for a rather lucrative microchip.

While Harry and Marv were smaller scale in terms of their crime antics, this lot are somewhat more ambitious and when Alex tries to warn the police, his parents, Jack (Kevin Kilmer) and Karen (Haviland Morris) are of course sceptical, along with his scornful siblings, so it becomes up to Alex to save the day and his neighbour, Mrs Hess (Marian Seldes) from the baddies in question.

The jokes effectively write themselves as Alex wastes no time coming up with as many traps and stunts to get the better of the gang in question and of course, there's also a nice friendship that builds up between him and Mrs Hess. His family on the other hand do seem a lot less focused on than Kevin's were. 

- This movie might be notable for being one of Scarlett Johansson's first movie roles. She plays Alex's sister. 

- Raja Gosnell who directed this movie, also edited the previous two.

- Despite being set in Chicago, there are no references to any characters from the first two movies. 

- In spite of the winter setting, it's actually set after Christmas, breaking away from the tradition of this franchise.

Home Alone 3 is much less of a sequel but more of an attempt of a reboot. The real question is that while it's nowhere near as good as the infamous first two movies, is it actually a bad movie? Truthfully, not really but nor is it a great one either. It lacks the magic of what went before but it's diverting enough to watch.

Rating: 6 out of 10