Like most holiday films, Home Alone 2 sucks. Even the script seems to acknowledge that the sequel to the massively popular Home Alone, which grossed $476 million globally, is a cynical cash grab. (One of the film’s noteworthy quotes on IMDB is “We did it again! Aah!”) The plot makes no sense. The jokes are worse versions of the jokes from the first movie. Compared with the original Home Alone, which does have fun moments, Home Alone 2 is a joyless slog. But because it’s a cynical cash grab about an entitled, destructive prick whose enemies include anybody who doesn’t enable him, it’s the perfect movie for the Trump era.
Did screenwriter John Hughes intend his screenplay (full title: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York) to be a treatise on the banality of America’s children of privilege? Did he feel the urgency we feel to upend the system before it implodes on itself around the impenetrable fortresses the 1 percent have built for themselves? Did he mean for it to make audiences want to chuck their movie popcorn and eat the rich instead? Almost certainly not. But this is a lunatic overreading of a holiday film, and artists don’t get to control the interpretations of their work.
All I, the viewer, have is the context in which I’m watching the movie, the marijuana edibles I have consumed during at least one (1) of those attempted viewings, the “Oh God what did he do now?” feeling I’ve had the second I’ve opened my eyes every morning for the last three years, and four hours to kill on a holiday flight from one of the coasts to the middle of the country. And you clicked on an article about a 27-year-old bad movie. So you’re complicit in this. Strap in.