Home Alone 3 (Hughes Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 1997)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After my husband Charles specifically requested a light movie last night because he’d been so depressed by the news out of Memphis, Tennessee on Friday, January 27, I found something suitably funny in Home Alone 3, the 1997 sequel to the sequel to the big 1991 hit, Home Alone. (According to imdeb.com, the original Home Alone came out in 1990, but I identified it as a year later because I made a joke about the name of its director, Chris Columbus: “At last! His first hit in 499 years!”) This time John Hughes, who served as both producer and screenwriter even though this time he got another director, Raja Gosnell, instead of Columbus, changed the dramatis personae completely and also changed the formula. Instead of Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) being inadvertently abandoned at home twice when the rest of his large family goes on vacation, the central character this time is eight-year-old Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz, who was born January 3, 1989 in Santa Barbara and whose last imdb.com credit was for a 2007 movie called Choose Connor; I was looking up his page to see if he’d had an adult acting career, which apparently he hasn’t) .who actually doesn’t get left home alone for over an hour or two. It seems his parents, Karen (Haviland Morris) and Jack (Kevin Kilmer), both have professional positions with domineering, egomaniac employers who call them out ot their home after regular hours daily. Who summon them to the office or a meeting somewhere or other and tell Alex to fend for himself as best he can.

Home Alone 3 contains an interesting MacGuffin – a computer chip that can be installed on a guided missile to make it invisible to radar – which has been stolen by four thieves, Petr Beaupre (Olek Krupa – any relation to Gene? Probably not, since Olek was born in Poland and Gene Krupa was a Greek-American from Chicago), Alice Robbons (a nice ice-queen performance by Rya Kihlstedt), Burton Jernigan (Lenny von Dohlen) and Earl Unger (David Thornton). Unlike the baddies in the first two Home Alones, this quartet are carefully not played for laughs themselves, which in a way is actually an improvement (though I liked the fact that Joe Pesci made the first Home Alone right after his role in a serious gangster film, Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, and showed himself equally adept at dramatic and comic villainy). The not-s-ofantastic four obtain the computer chip (actually an integrated circuit that contains at least two chips, judging from what we see of it here) but then have to figure out a way to smuggle it out of the airport and home in San Francisco. They hide it in a remote-controlled toy car and put the car in a Parisian sourdough French bread bag, only the bag gets mixed up with another person’s purchase of French bread and winds up on its way to Chicago. (I loved the gag of the bread’s intended recipient disappointed because the bag doesn’t contain it; I remember Parisian French bread from my days in San Francisco and how good it was.)

It ends up in the home of Mrs. Hess (Marian Seldes), who serves the same plot function as the male recluse Marley, played by Roberts Blossom,in the first two films in the cycle. Mrs. Hess has hired Alex Pruitt to sweep the snow from her front yard, but she’s so disappointed in his work that instead of paying him in cash she palms off the toy car on him. Alex, of course, is overjoyed and gets a real kick out of playing with it. Then the bad guys in San Francisco realize that the toy car in which they concealed the chip ended up in Chicago – and so do the FBI’s team led by Special Agtent Stuckey (Christopher Curry) who are tasked with recovering it. After a couple of incidents in which Alex spots the crooks in Mrs Hess’s house with his toy telescope and calls the police, only the crooks get away before the cops show up and Alex is chewed out by the police chief nad his parents for reporting false claims, the crooks duly show up and Alex gleefully torments them with some of the same booby traps Kevin worked up in the first two films. (They’re not as funny this time around because we don’t see Alex actually manufacturing them.) Eventually the police and the FBI arrive in time to save Alex from being done away with by the crooks, Special Agent Stuckey recovers the tell-tale chip, and though at first he takes only three of the gang into custody and insists he’ll still be going after the fourth in language that makes him sound like Ahab in a spoof of Moby Dick, ultimately Alex sets off a room full of firecrackers and in so doing flushes out the remaining bad guy so Stuckey can arrest him.

There are some delightful gags, notably one in which Alice tells two of her male confederates to leap off the roof of the house, confident that the circle on the ground is a trampoline. It’s actually the cover to the Pruitts’ swimming pool, and the two crooks end up virtually drowning in ice-cold water. It also helps that Alex has only two older siblings – he’s just the last of three kids instead of the last of seven as Kevin was in the first two movies – and the sibs, brother Stan (Seth Smith) and sister Molly (Scarlett Johansson, about the only person associated with this film who went on to a major adult career; she was only 12 when she made this, but she looks a few years older) are considerably less annoying than the ones in the first films. Home Alone 3 is a quite good movie, well up to the standard of the first two and a tribute to John Hughes’ versatility as a filmmaker that he could do family comedies with kid protagonists as well as films about alienated teens. My husband Charles had an interesting analysis of the three Home Alone movies in which he argued that the first Home Alone was the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy – imagining a world without your parents around setting limits on what you can and can’t do – while the second was about atonement and this one was about the military-industrial complex and its influence on society.