7.5/10
I have watched Home Alone roughly a dozen times. It was a staple of my younger years. I will probably watch it again next December. The film holds up better than it has any right to, given that it is essentially Three Stooges slapstick crossed with Laurel and Hardy timing wrapped around a children’s Christmas movie about parental abandonment. The 7.5 reflects what the rewatch test has confirmed: the film is funnier than it should be, weirder than I noticed when I was younger, and held back from a higher rating by a sequel that does the same thing better.
Home Alone is a strange film. The strangeness is part of why it lasts. A family forgets their eight-year-old son in the chaos of leaving for Paris. The boy spends the next four days alone, terrorizing two house burglars with industrial-grade booby traps that would kill adult men in the real world. A subplot follows the mother trying to get home through Christmas Eve travel chaos. Another subplot follows the estranged elderly neighbor everyone thinks is a murderer. The film treats all of this as a comedy and largely gets away with it. Once you start cataloguing the weirdness, the catalog does not stop.
The Setup
The McAllister family is wealthy enough to take an extended family Christmas trip to Paris. Eight-year-old Kevin, the youngest of the kids, is the family scapegoat. His older siblings bully him. His cousins ignore him. His parents are stressed and impatient. On the night before the flight, Kevin gets in a fight with his older brother Buzz over pizza, throws a tantrum, and is sent to sleep in the attic. He says he wishes his family would disappear. The next morning, a storm has knocked out the power, the alarm clocks did not go off, the family oversleeps, and in the rush to make the flight, they miscount the kids on the way out the door. Kevin is left behind. The family does not realize until they are mid-flight to France.
The weirdness is already running. The family is awful to Kevin in a way that makes the audience root for his wish to come true. The parents are flawed in a way the film mostly does not punish. The mother spends the rest of the film trying to get home. The father is barely present. The Catholic guilt subtext is operating from the opening reel: Kevin makes a wish, the wish comes true, he then has to live with the consequences and earn redemption by surviving the burglars and reconciling with his estranged neighbor. The film never says this out loud. The film does not have to.
For Writers
Home Alone makes its protagonist sympathetic by giving him a worse situation than he deserves. Kevin starts as a brat. He has tantrums. He throws fits. He is not particularly likable in his opening scenes. The film fixes the sympathy problem by making everyone around him worse. Buzz is cruel. The parents are dismissive. The cousins are mocking. By the time Kevin wishes his family would disappear, the audience has been given enough evidence to agree with the wish. The lesson is that protagonist sympathy is comparative instead of absolute. A flawed character becomes sympathetic when the people around them are more flawed. If your protagonist is unlikeable on the page, the fix is often not to change the protagonist. The fix is to look at who they are surrounded by and ask whether the surrounding cast is making the protagonist look worse than they need to.
The Wet Bandits
Joe Pesci plays Harry. Daniel Stern plays Marv. They are the burglars who have been casing the McAllister house and decide to rob it while the family is away. The casting of Pesci is one of the great weird choices in early-90s comedy. Pesci had just won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Goodfellas, released two months before Home Alone in 1990. He went from playing Tommy DeVito, one of the most psychotic gangsters in film history, to playing a slapstick burglar who gets hit in the face with paint cans by an eight-year-old. The casting works because Pesci does not soften his menace. He plays Harry as genuinely dangerous, just smaller and dumber than the gangster he had played a few months earlier.
Pesci’s swearing on the Goodfellas set was so habitual that director Chris Columbus had to ask him to invent kid-safe substitutes for Home Alone. Pesci settled on a hissing nonsense-syllable that the film leans into as character business. Watch his scenes carefully and you can see the moments where Pesci was clearly biting down on the actual word he wanted to use. That tension between what Pesci would have said and what Pesci was allowed to say is part of why Harry feels dangerous even in the slapstick sequences.
Daniel Stern plays Marv as the lankier, dumber, more physically suffering half of the duo. Stern takes the brunt of the slapstick. The blowtorch on the head. The iron in the face. The tarantula on the cheek. Marv is the Curly figure of the pair, the punching bag, the one who keeps getting hurt and keeps coming back for more. Stern commits completely. The performance is largely physical and the physicality is excellent.
The Marley Subplot
Old Man Marley is the elderly neighbor everyone in Kevin’s neighborhood thinks is a serial killer. The local children call him the South Bend Shovel Slayer because they have heard rumors he murdered his family with a snow shovel. The rumors are not true. Marley is estranged from his son and has not seen his granddaughter in years. He spends Christmas Eve at the church listening to a children’s choir his granddaughter sings in, hoping for a glimpse of her.
The Marley subplot is the emotional spine of the film. Kevin meets Marley in the church on Christmas Eve. They talk. Marley reveals he is estranged from his son and is afraid to call him because the fight has gone on too long. Kevin admits he sometimes wishes his family would not come back. The two of them, the lonely child and the lonely old man, give each other the same advice: call your family. Tell them you love them. Do it before it is too late. The scene is played with restraint. Roberts Blossom plays Marley as a man whose loneliness has worn grooves into his face. The exchange is the heart of the film.
For Writers
The Marley subplot works because it mirrors the main plot at a different scale. Kevin is lonely for four days. Marley has been lonely for years. Kevin’s family will be back by the end of the film. Marley’s family is uncertain. The two characters share the same emotional state in different time frames, and the parallel makes both stories deeper than either would be alone. If you are writing a protagonist with an emotional problem, ask yourself what an older version of that problem looks like. Put that older version in the story as a secondary character. The two will resonate against each other and the audience will feel both at once. The technique works in any genre. Home Alone uses it in a Christmas comedy. The Lord of the Rings uses it with Frodo and Bilbo. The principle is the same. Pair the protagonist with a mirror at a different stage of the same journey.
The Traps
The third act is essentially a thirty-minute slapstick sequence in which Kevin defends his house from Harry and Marv using a series of escalating booby traps. The blowtorch on the doorknob. The micro-machines on the floor. The paint cans swinging on ropes. The nail through the bare foot. The iron dropping down the laundry chute. The tarantula on Marv’s face. The film treats these as cartoon violence and the audience accepts them as cartoon violence, but the underlying physics suggests Harry and Marv would have died half a dozen times.
The realism question is the standard weird-Home-Alone complaint and it is also the wrong question. The traps are not meant to be realistic. They are Three Stooges traps. They operate by cartoon logic where the victim absorbs damage that would kill a real person and gets up to absorb more. Wile E. Coyote logic, applied to live-action burglars. The film commits to the logic and the audience commits with it. If you started watching Home Alone expecting realism, you stopped expecting realism the moment the first paint can swung.
Dr. Mike Varshavski, the YouTube doctor with millions of subscribers, did an entertaining reaction video in December 2020 going through each trap from a medical perspective. WIRED produced a similar video in 2021 with trauma surgeon Dr. Annie Onishi. Both arrive at the same conclusion: Harry and Marv would have been in the hospital within minutes of the first trap. The blowtorch alone would cause third-degree scalp burns. The paint cans would fracture multiple facial bones and cause concussions. The iron to the face would shatter the orbital bone and risk permanent vision damage. The nail through the bare foot would require immediate surgical intervention and carry a high infection risk. The medical breakdowns are entertaining specifically because they are diagnosing injuries the film never asked the audience to believe in the first place. The diagnoses are correct. The diagnoses are also beside the point. The audience is watching a Three Stooges short stretched to thirty minutes. The Three Stooges always survived the next short. So do Harry and Marv.
For Writers
The trap sequence works because the film shows Kevin building the traps before the burglars arrive. Every trap that pays off in the second half is set up in the first half. The audience watches Kevin gather materials, watches him plan, watches him test. By the time Harry steps on the Christmas ornaments in the kitchen, the audience already knows where the ornaments came from and why they are there. The setup-payoff discipline is what separates slapstick that works from slapstick that does not. Anyone can write a scene where someone gets hit in the face with a paint can. The scene only lands if the audience has been waiting for the paint can for thirty minutes. Plant your setups early. Trust the audience to remember them. Pay them off when the audience has almost forgotten and then thrill them by remembering for the audience.
The Slapstick Lineage
Home Alone is operating in a tradition that goes back almost a century. The trap sequence borrows directly from the Three Stooges (the escalating physical pain, the cartoon-logic invulnerability, the back-and-forth between the two villains). The character pairing borrows from Laurel and Hardy (Pesci as the angry small one, Stern as the tall dumb one who suffers more). The split between dramatic A-plot and comedic B-plot borrows from silent-era Chaplin films like The Kid, where sentimental drama and physical comedy run parallel through the same runtime.
The film acknowledges its lineage explicitly. The fictional movie Kevin watches in his uncle’s bedroom, the noir gangster film Angels with Filthy Souls, is itself a parody of 1930s and 1940s gangster cinema. The film knows it is a slapstick film. The film knows what slapstick films look like. The film positions itself in the tradition while updating the tradition for 1990 audiences. This is why it ages well. Tradition does not age out the way trend does.
Craft: The John Williams Score
Craft Note
John Williams composed the score for Home Alone in 1990, the same period when he was scoring Hook for Spielberg and continuing his work on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. The Home Alone score is one of the most underrated entries in his catalog because the film around it is a Christmas comedy instead of a prestige picture. The main theme, “Somewhere in My Memory,” became one of the great Christmas-movie themes of the era and gets played in shopping malls every December alongside Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. The action scoring during the trap sequences cribs from Williams’ own Indiana Jones vocabulary but scaled down for child-stakes peril, with woodwinds and strings handling material that would have been carried by full brass in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The choral arrangements during the church scenes lend the Marley reconciliation moment a religious weight the script alone would not have earned. The score is doing structural work the script is not. The film is a 7.5 with the Williams score. Without it, the film is probably a 6.5. Most viewers do not consciously notice film music. The music is doing its job specifically because they do not notice it. Williams has spent fifty years operating at this level. The Home Alone score is a lesser-discussed example of why he is the most awarded film composer in history.
What Keeps It At 7.5
The film is good. The sequel is better. That is the main reason Home Alone is not rated higher in my catalog. Home Alone 2 is funnier, has a stronger setting, has Tim Curry, and scales up the slapstick without losing the emotional spine. The original is the platform the sequel improves on. The original would rate higher if the sequel did not exist.
The film also has pacing issues in the middle. The mother’s journey home through travel-chaos hell is a subplot that runs longer than it needs to. The John Candy polka-band sequence is funny on first watch and increasingly skippable on rewatch. The film’s second act, before the trap sequence begins, sags in places. The first act sets up the situation efficiently. The third act is the slapstick centerpiece. The second act is where the film stretches.
None of this is fatal. The film is a 7.5 because it works. The weirdness, the slapstick, the Marley subplot, the Williams score, and the Pesci-Stern chemistry are enough to carry it. It will be playing on television every December for as long as television exists.
The Verdict
A 7.5. The film is genuinely good, has its weirdness baked in as part of its appeal, and operates in a slapstick tradition older than most of the people who watch it know about. The Three Stooges plus Laurel and Hardy plus a Christmas-card emotional spine. It works.
I have watched it a dozen times. I will watch it again. The film has paid me back twelve viewings worth of investment and shows no signs of stopping. The 7.5 is the right rating for a Christmas comedy that has held up across a generation and is one notch below its own sequel. See the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York review for the companion piece. The sequel is the rare case where the follow-up surpasses a very good original.