Film Review

Home Sweet Home Alone (2021) • Disney+

A married couple tries to steal back a valuable heirloom from a troublesome kid.

Remaking festive favourite Home Alone (1990) comes with risks its own immediate sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), stumbled on, let alone the three non-theatrical movies that followed. Fundamentally, it’s a simple premise that doesn’t lend itself well to repetition, so all that’s ever on offer is variations on the concept of a child being left home alone and having to defend their house from burglars using ingenious booby-traps. Now, Disney+ have revived the franchise for a straightforward “remake” (although one cameo suggests this is technically a sequel to Home Alone 2, following new characters), but Home Sweet Home Alone’ s tweaks to the formula cause it avoidable problems.

Home Sweet Home Alone again involves a rich Chicago family who go on Christmas vacation (to Japan not Europe), leaving one of their children behind in the rush to the airport. This time our little hero Max Mercer (Archie Yates) is English, for no discernible reason, making me presume Yates just couldn’t do an American…