Home Alone 3 Reviews

A slavish reworking of HOME ALONE's box office-busting premise -- unsupervised by self-centered parents, a cute and preternaturally clever tyke outfoxes adult evildoers -- this sequel features a freshly minted child star; new, anxiety-producing excuses for his neglected state (working parents of the world, start feeling really bad); a quartet of buffoonish baddies; and more sadistic violence than I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. Eight-year-old Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz) is home with the chicken pox and blissfully unaware that the remote-controlled car he was given by an elderly neighbor contains a stolen microchip bursting with Defense Department secrets. A quartet of sinister international mercenaries (Olek Krupa, Rya Kihlstedt, David Thornton and Lenny Van Dolen) want the chip and will stop at nothing to get it. With Alex's pantywaist pop (so addled a figure of masculine authority that but for Alex's intervention he'd leave the house without his trousers) on a business trip and harried supermom (Haviland Morris) forced to deal with an office emergency, speckly little Alex must construct a series of Rube Goldberg-esque booby-traps to keep the evil foreigners from despoiling the family hearth. Barbell to the noggin, anyone? Loose board to the forehead? How about electrified lawn furniture, a concealed swimming pool (and conveniently placed trampoline), quick-drying glue and a three-story fall down a dumbwaiter shaft? And let's not even talk about how many times the various guys get whacked in the gonads -- it's too painful to contemplate at any length. It's all totally cartoonish -- Three Stooges gags are more realistic -- and lots of kids will laugh. Do you want to take them? That's your call.