Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 15/20; Dylan: 11/20; Emma: 15/20; Abbey: 19/20)
Plot: Some really bad parents leave their 8-year-old home alone and fly to France for the holidays. A pair of burglars try to rob his house but are in for more than they bargain for!
Macaulay Culkin is really likable during a lot of scenes in this movie. Well, maybe during a couple scenes. Unfortunately, he's really annoying during the rest of the scenes. The spoiled-brat bad behavior stuff before he's left home alone makes me almost want to root for the burglars, and the barrage of screaming, celebrating, and cutesiness gets painful after a while. Compare Culkin to Peter Billingsley in the far-superior A Christmas Story. Billingsley, or maybe Bob Clark who directed him, understands subtlety. Culkin, although he was younger and already hooked on heroin when this was filmed, doesn't. So even though it's always funny to see Joe Pesci with the top of his head on fire or Daniel Stern getting hit in the groin, there are a lot of scenes in this where it feels like you're the one getting a blow torch to the scalp or a shot to the groin. And getting punched in the groin three times just to see somebody else punched in the groin once just isn't worth it although I think I just invented a new game show. When you see this movie a second or third or fourth or fifth time, you really feel like you're wading through a bunch of crap to get to the cool booby trap scenes at the end. Once there, you realize that they're not nearly as funny as you remember them and have nothing better to do but focus on how the scenes with Roberts Blossom (the old guy) and his shovel didn't really need to be here. Sappiness drenches this thing by the end with that father/son reunion, the mother coming back home, and all the other relatives coming back home at just the right Hollywood time.
My new favorite thing about this movie is that there are apparently people who believe Elvis makes a cameo. Of course, the King had been dead for about fourteen years, but that doesn't stop people from thinking the extra standing behind Catherine O'Hara is him:
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