7.5/10
Official trailer
I’ve watched Home Alone roughly a dozen times. It was a staple of my younger years. I’ll probably watch it again next December. The film holds up better than it’s any right to, given that it’s 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 cataloging the weirdness, the catalog doesn’t 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 didn’t 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 doesn’t realize until they’re 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 doesn’t punish. The mother spends the rest of the film trying to get home. The father is barely present.
I’m on Kevin’s side from the moment he’s sent to the attic, brat or not. Buzz is a bully, the cousins pile on, and the parents barely register their youngest until he’s gone. I think the film is smart to make the McAllisters this unpleasant, because it lets me enjoy a kid getting abandoned without feeling like a monster about it.
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, and it doesn’t have to.
For Writers
To make its protagonist sympathetic, Home Alone gives him a worse situation than he deserves. Kevin starts as a brat. He’s tantrums. He throws fits. He’s not especially 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’re 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’re 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, among 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 doesn’t soften his menace. He plays Harry as dangerous, just smaller and dumber than the gangster he’d 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 uses 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.
Pesci is the reason this film works for me. His swallowed curses are funnier to me than any trap in the third act, and Stern taking a tarantula on the cheek gets the biggest laugh out of me in the whole picture. The two of them play it completely straight, and that commitment is what sells the cartoon.
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’ve heard rumors he murdered his family with a snow shovel. The rumors aren’t true. Marley is estranged from his son and hasn’t 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’s 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 wouldn’t 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’s 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. The church scene is where the film wins me over. I think Blossom does more with a tired face and a few quiet lines than the rest of the cast manages in the whole runtime, and it’s the one moment in Home Alone that moves me.
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’re 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 land 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 path.
The Traps
The third act is 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’s also the wrong question. The traps are Three Stooges traps. They work 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 because they’re diagnosing injuries the film never asked the audience to believe in the first place. The diagnoses are correct and 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’re there. The setup-payoff discipline separates slapstick that works from slapstick that doesn’t.
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
The movie 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.
Explicitly, the film acknowledges its lineage. 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’s a slapstick film and knows what slapstick films look like. It positions itself in the tradition while updating the tradition for 1990 audiences. This is why it ages well. Tradition doesn’t 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 among 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 shopping malls play it 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 full brass would have carried in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The choral arrangements during the church scenes lend the Marley reconciliation moment a religious weight the script alone wouldn’t have earned.
The score is doing structural work the script isn’t. The film is a 7.5 with the Williams score. Without it, the film is probably a 6.5. Most viewers don’t consciously notice film music. The music is doing its job because they don’t notice it. Williams has spent fifty years operating at this level.
The Home Alone score is a lesser-discussed example of why he’s the most awarded film composer in history.
What Keeps It At 7.5
It’s good. The sequel is better. That’s the main reason Home Alone isn’t 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. Without the sequel, the original would rate higher.
The middle is where I get restless. The mother’s trek home through travel-chaos hell runs longer than it needs to, and the John Candy polka-band sequence is funny on first watch and increasingly skippable on rewatch. I’d cut the polka band down to a single exchange and get back to Kevin. The first act sets up the situation efficiently and the third act is the slapstick centerpiece, so the sag in the second act stands out.
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 hold it together. It’ll be playing on television every December for as long as television exists.
Is Home Alone worth watching?
A 7.5. The film is good, has its weirdness baked in as part of its appeal, and works 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’ve watched it a dozen times. I’ll 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’s 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.
The 7.5 feels right to me. I laugh at this film more than a comedy about a forgotten eight-year-old has any business earning, Pesci and Stern are a joy, and the Marley scene moves me. What holds it below an 8 is that saggy middle and a sequel that does all of this better with Tim Curry on top.
