The Shoemaker Bugle

By Karissa Meno

We love to start the holidays early, especially with our Christmas movies. There’s no better feeling than watching a Christmas movie, especially the Home Alone movies. Even though the new movies will never be better than the original, it’s just like every other Christmas movie.

Home Sweet Home Alone is directed by Dan Mazer, produced by Hutch Parker and Dan Wilson, with the story by Mikey Day, Streeter Seidell, and John Hughes. The cast consists of Archie Yates (Max Mercer), Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Aisling Bea, Kenan Thompson, Pete Holmes, Ally Maki, and Chris Parnell.

The movie follows the same format as the previous ones, but focuses on Max Mercer, who lives in a similar family situation. Max and his mother Carol stop by an open house being run by broke couple Jeff and Pam, who can no longer afford to pay it’s mortgage. Max goes to the bathroom there, and afterwards converses about their collection of porcelain dolls. Carol suggests selling them for money, and after finding them worth thousands of dollars scramble to sell them, only to find one missing. Tracing the doll back to Max, they decide to try and break into the house to retrieve it. Max, on the other hand, gets ready for a trip to Tokyo for Christmas. On the day of, though, Max accidentally gets left behind, and subsequently has to face Jeff and Pam solo. He decides to fill the shoes of Kevin, and sets up traps to catch them in the act.

Even though every Christmas movie is meant to be wholesome and cheerful, I wasn’t feeling any sort of direct emotion towards the movie. The movie seemed uneventful and felt like every other remake of Home Alone. It felt stale and sort of dried up, along with being typical and harboring no aspects of the original Home Alone movies. The story was trying too hard to make sense of it all, and as a result didn’t seem as important. The movie felt slow but at the same time felt like the movie was happening all at once. If you enjoy any particular Christmas movie there are good characteristics to take away from the movie, but this Christmas movie was personally not my favorite.