Home Alone 2: Lost in New York *** (1992, Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard) – Classic Movie Review 2858

Director Chris Columbus’s hastily concocted 1992 sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York re-assembles the whole hit 1990 Home Alone team for Macaulay Culkin’s re-match with bumbling baddies Joe Pesci (as Harry Lime!) and Daniel Stern (as Marv).

One year after the home alone events of the first film, he is once again separated from his mom (Catherine O’Hara) and dad (John Heard), this time on a vacation to New York. Harry and Marv turn up there too, plotting a huge holiday heist.

Culkin again turns on the ingratiating cute charm as Kevin McCallister, in an effortless, natural performance that makes acting look like child’s play. Producer John Hughes’s screenplay might be slightly less funny than before but it is propped up by the expert returning cast as well as by plucky turns from British star character actors Tim Curry as a hotel employee and Brenda Fricker as a bag lady.

But is the cheeky, rowdy and rumbustious Kevin McCallister a good role model? The simple, good-natured comedy is laced with considerable malice in the knockabout scenes, and perhaps it is a bit worrying that sickly and unpleasant violence by an 11-year-old boy is presented as fun and funny.

But then everyone knows that it’s only a movie, and that it’s a daft slapstick comedy. More worrying is the carelessness of the parents, who leave the boy home alone yet again through their carelessness, causing all his problems in the first place.

Macaulay’s brother Kieran Culkin plays his cousin Fuller in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Also in the Home Alone 2 cast are Devin Ratray, Hillary Wolf, Eddie Bracken and Dana Ivey, Maureen Elisabeth Shay, Michael C. Maronna, Gerry Bamman, Terrie Snell, Jedidiah Cohen, Senta Moses Mikan, and Diana Rein.

Donald Trump makes a small but memorable cameo when Kevin McCallister enters the famous Plaza Hotel and ends up asking Trump for some directions in the lobby.

Kevin McCallister asks Donald Trump for directions in Home Alone 2.

There have been three more sequels so far, without Macaulay Culkin, starting with Home Alone 3 (1997) and Home Alone 4 (2002), and the most recent Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012).

The role of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone (1990) was written for Macaulay by John Hughes after he was featured in his Uncle Buck (1989).

Talented but unfairly struggling to gain recognition as an adult actor, Macaulay Culkin has found difficulty maintaining the momentum of his film career, but made Party Monster, Saved!, Jerusalemski sindrom, Sex and Breakfast (2007), The Wrong Ferarri, Adam Green’s Aladdin, and Changeland (2019). Astonishingly, Culkin turned 40 on August 26 2020.

In January 2018, Culkin said he prefers the first Home Alone movie over the sequel because ‘It had 100% less Trump’.

Trump also has a cameo in Ghosts Can’t Do It, The Little Rascals, Across the Sea of Time, Eddie, The Associate, 54, Celebrity, Zoolander, Two Weeks Notice and Marmalade.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2858

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The poster for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).