Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (John Hughes Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Given how much last night’s news coverage on MS-NBC had focused almost exclusively on Donald Trump, it was with some degree of trepidation that the movie I chose to screen for my husband Charles and I last night was Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. This was the 1992 sequel to the original Home Alone, which Charles and I had watched Christmas night, and it’s the one in which Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), lost and alone in New York after he got on the wrong plane – his family was going to spend the Christmas season in Florida but he missed the plane and got on one flying to New York instead – encounters Donald Trump, playing himself, and asks him for directions to the Plaza Hotel lobby. At the time this film was made Trump owned the Plaza Hotel (he sold it in 1995 and it’s now, according to Google, “owned by Katara Hospitality, a Qatar based hospitality group that owns more than 40 international hotels”), and I suspect that Trump made it a condition of allowing producer John Hughes and 20th Century-Fox to use the Plaza Hotel that he be in the movie. (It is known that Trump had a hissyfit when his cameo was edited out of the vrsionshown on Canada's commercial TV channel; he claimed it was part oif a political vendetta against him, when it was really just an effort on the part of 20th Century-Fox to get the film's running time down from 120 to 100 minutes so they coujld squeeze in more commercials.)

Since Trump only has the one scene, and it’s over relatively quickly, his appearance does almost no damage to the entertainment value of this movie, which is actually quite strong. Writer John Hughes did a good job of working various plot elements fron the original Home Alone inito this sequel – since we watched them just four days apart we probably picked up on the similarities more readily than we would have if we’d seen them two years apart – without just basically making the same movie over again. This film begins with Kevin arguing with his parents because he refuses to forgive his bullying older brother Buzz (Devin Ratrey) after Buzz offers a patently insincere “apology,” As a penalty, Kevin is locked into the attic again with his bed-wetting brother Fuller (played by Kieran Culkin, Macaulay’s real-life brother). Once again, as in the first film, the McCallisters nearly miss their plane – this time, instead of a storm-caused blackout, it’s the fault of Kevin’s dad Peter (John Heard), who unplugged the clock radio in order to recharge his phone – and though the rest of the McCallisters make the plane to Florida in time, Kevin ends up on a flight to New York by mistake. Meanwhile, the two spectacularly incompetent burglars from the first movie, Harry Lynne (Joe Pesci) and Marv Munchins (Daniel Stern), have escaped from prison and found themselves in New York, eager for a big score.

For his first day or so in New York Kevin has the time of his life at the Plaza Hotel, courtesy of his dad’s credit card, which was in a bag Kevin was carrying for the family. He checks himself into the Plaza Hotel and gets the attention of a supercilious concierge (Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, who comes off like an A-1 graduate of the Franklin Pangborn School of Hospitality). Kevin tells the concierge that his dad is joining him any moment now and, when the concierge sneaks into the room, Kevin has rigged up an inflatable mannequin to make it look like dad is taking a shower. As one of the peris of staying at the Plaza, Kevin books a stretch limo and gets it to take him to Duncan’s toy shop,whose owner, Mr. Duncan (Eddie Bracken, comic leading man from Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero in the mid-1940’s), insists on taking all the proceeds from his Christmas Eve business in cash and giving it to a children’s charity because, it’s explained, he just loves little kids. (In today’s much less innocent age, the moment we hear that this adult man loves children we almost immediately assume he’s a pedophile and wants to seduce them – the kinds of allegations made against Macaulay.Culkin’s real-life friend, Michael Jackson, whom Culkin testified for in his trial on molestation charges.) Naturally the burglars hear about this and target Duncan’s toy shop as their next big target.

In the meantime, the other McCallisters are inFlorida – where their vacation is literally being washed out by heavy rainstorms that are forcing them to stay in their hotel room (a nice, if rather obvious, irony on the part of writer Hughes). Peter reports his credit card as “stolen” – and Tim Curry’s concierge says nothing as his computer declines Kevin’s card, but the expression on his face says, “I knew it!” – at least partly in the hope that if Kevin tries to use it,it will activate a signal from the card company that will let the rest of the family know where Kevin is. Though Kevin has been thrown out of the Plaza, he’s taken in by a character identified only as ‘Pigeon Lady” (Brenda Fricker), who sneaks him into Carnegie Hall for a Christmas “pops” concert conducted by John Williams (who also composed the score for this, as well as the first Home Alone) and pours out her tale of woe that she lost a lover as a young woman and never got involved with anyone romantically again. Kevin takes pity on her and ghves her one of two turtle dove pins he got at Duncan’s toy store, explaining that they’re love tokens and whenever one of them looks at theirs, they’ll be reminded and emotionally connected to the other. Kevin finds his dad’s address book and learns the location of the brownstone where another uncle of his lives when he’s not in Paris (where the McCallisters were on their way to see him in the first film), only he doesn’t realize that the house is closed down and in the process of being remodeled.

Naturally that gives him lots of material he can play with to booby-trap the place with the same kinds of gags he used in the first Home Alone, and though once again some of the gags are unpleasantly sadistic (notably one in which Kevin not only sets Harry’s hair on fire but, when Harry tries to dunk his head in the toilet, he doesn’t realize that Kevin has filled the bowl with kerosene, and as soon as Harry puts his head in the toilet director Chris Columbus cuts to an explosion). This time the gags look less like the stuff of silent-film comedy and more like animated cartoons, including a marvelous scene in which Marv is about to have a bag of cement dropped on him, and Columbus shoots the scene in slow-motion the way it was done in an old cartoon. The bag seemingly takes forever to reach its target – and Daniel Stern stares helplessly at it and doesn’t even try to get out of the way. Eventually the two burglars ambush Kevin and threaten to kill him – only he’s saved by the pigeon lady, who throws bird food on them so the pigeons attack the bad guys. (When this scene came on I joked, “Mary Poppins meets The Birds.”) Meanwhile, mom Kate (Catherine O’Hara) deduces that since Kevin loves Christmas trees so much, he’s likely to seek out the biggest Christmas tree in New York – the one at Rockefeller Center – and the two eventually reunite, though there’s a tag scene at the end when Peter gets the bill for Kevin’s unaccompanied stay in New York and learns he ran up almost $1,000 in room-service charges.

Home Alone 2 is a quite charming film, a sequel not only made by most of the same people who did the first movie but also they clearly understood what had appealed to people about their first movie and worked to duplicate it with just enough variations to makeit interesting. (Compare it to the ghastly Ghostbusters II, which was likewise made by most of the same creative people who worked on the marvelous original but missed what had made the first film so good: the contrast between the dark, almost noir backgrounds and the comedy scenes that were played against them.) Though I hadn’t seen it when it was new, now Home Alone 2 turned out to be a quite funny and moving entertainment, definitely worth seeing and a flim of real quality even if, like the first Home Alone, it falls far short of masterpiece status.