Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 24%
Well, here's a low-hanging fruit that deserves more than the one-paragraph treatment I gave it in my Home Alone review in 2012. I called it "despicable," urged readers never to watch it "under any circumstances," and even made sarcastic comments about actors French Stewart and Daniel Stern. That wasn't really fair. Daniel Stern is a reliable character actor, and French Stewart does all he possibly can with the material he has to work with here.
However, I should add that, according to Wikipedia, Daniel Stern refused to appear in this picture, calling it "an insult, total garbage." This quote is unsourced and unverifiable, but what would you have said if they'd asked you to play Marv?
As I mentioned before, this movie was released 10 years after Home Alone 2, but all the characters are played by different, much younger actors. Kevin's enormous family has been reduced to two siblings, Buzz and Megan, who are still bullies. His parents are separated, and his father plans to marry a rich woman named Natalie. Natalie is a decent person who tries her best to be a good stepmother to Kevin, but for some reason we're supposed to view her as a villain.
Fed up with his family as usual, Kevin decides to spend Christmas with dad and Natalie in their capacious mansion. Actually it's more than a mansion; it's a high-tech palace that rivals Smart House. Left with the run of the place during the workday, Kevin enjoys playing with the voice-controlled gadget that controls doors, fireplaces, and showerheads, but the grouchy butler Prescott wishes the little brat would go home. Fortunately, grandmotherly housekeeper Molly is there to look out for him. (In case you're keeping score, no, Kevin is neither at home nor alone.)
But since this is a Home Alone movie, inevitably the Wet Bandits have to make their appearance sooner or later. For some reason, Harry has hung up his crowbar, so instead we get Marv and his loving wife Vera, who scheme to kidnap a crown prince who will be spending Christmas with Natalie. Marv looks and behaves very differently than he did in the old days, and curiously he wears Harry's black stocking cap in every scene. Did the wardrobe department get them mixed up?
You might have thought that the high-tech gadgetry would provide a lot of new opportunities for wacky slapstick sequences involving Marv and Vera, but I guess the writers figured that was too obvious. Instead Kevin thwarts their crimes by bonking them over the head with pots and pans.
Awkwardly, the encounters between Kevin and the Wet Bandits are staggered across a string of clumsy sequences, with the bad guys repeatedly finding new excuses to break into the house and then leave again. First they show up to "get the lay of the land", and Kevin defeats them by turning on all the water in the master bathroom and filling the entire ground floor of the house with six inches of standing water. Unequivocally the best scene in the movie is the one where the bathroom door bursts open and Marv and Vera are carried downstairs on a giant tidal wave that floods the entire house. The first time I saw this, it made me laugh uncontrollably. It's not quite enough to make the movie worth watching, but this is gratuitous property damage straight out of Steve Urkel's playbook, and it is worthy of an encore.
Anyway, when Natalie comes home to eight inches of standing water covering the first floor of her house, she blames Kevin. Kevin insists that the burglars are to blame, but none of the adults believe his story. (And even if they did, I'm not sure this was a reasonable response to a housebreaking.) Meanwhile, Kevin concludes that Prescott must be working for the crooks, since he failed to respond to Kevin's call for help.
The bad guys return during a dinner party, disguised as caterers, hoping to abduct the prince. Unfortunately for them, the prince's flight was delayed, so after another pointless run-in with Kevin, they resolve to break in yet again on Christmas day. When they do, they imprison Kevin and Prescott—who was innocent all along—in the wine cellar. It turns out their inside man was actually Molly, who is Marv's mother. Trapped in the cellar, Kevin uses Prescott's last few minutes of cell phone battery life to call first Buzz and then his mother. When the phone call cuts out, the mother panics and burns rubber to get to Natalie's house. If only there were some simple way to contact professional law enforcement officers during an emergency! Eventually, Kevin and Prescott escape, and a few uninspired pranks later all three Wet Bandits are apprehended.
Once everyone is safe, Kevin's dad reveals that he has decided, purely out of narrative necessity, to leave Natalie and move back in with his family. Even the crown prince, who has finally arrived on the scene, wants to stay with Kevin's family instead of Natalie. Natalie is devastated, but that serves her right for having done absolutely nothing whatsoever to incur anyone's animosity! That'll teach her to be a disfavored love interest!
Kevin brings the entire production to a close by using the voice-control system to cause it to start snowing. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the entire production company laughing at your expense.
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