Home Alone Meets Don Corleone

Over Christmas I wound up rewatching HOME ALONE and HOME ALONE 2 for the first time since the 90s.

I initially saw HOME ALONE 2 with my grandfather, God rest his soul. After the movie he gave me a lengthy lecture about the dangers of using paint thinner in an improper manner. 🙂

But! The movies hold up pretty well, and is my wont, I started thinking about them in terms of story structure and characterization. Kevin McCallister is very clearly a genius with a strong gift for tactics and psychology. A pity he never had a chance to study under someone like Sherlock Holmes or Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Of course, he’s only ten, so he makes some serious mistakes. Fortunately for Kevin, his enemies are stupid and clearly not up to the task of dealing with an opponent like him. Harry and Marv have a certain level of cunning, but thinking things through is clearly is not their forte. Which I suppose is true to Real Life – housebreakers tend to be either on drugs, not all that bright, or both. The smart criminals go into other fields. To quote Don Corleone from a different classic movie (definitely not a Christmas one), a lawyer with his briefcase can steal a thousand times more than a man with a gun. 🙂 Or nowadays, a cybercriminal with his laptop.

And Harry and Marv should have died like fifteen times in the second movie. Paint thinner really is dangerous when not handled properly.

The movies are also something of a relic, falling into the ever-growing category of movies whose plot would not work now that cell phones and mobile Internet are ubiquitous. Which is not a flaw, mind.

But! They’re still enjoyable. I suppose the character of Kevin McCallister would be in his 40s by now. Given his natural talents, I suspect he became either a Sherlock Holmes-esque private detective or some sort of CIA black ops specialist who always maintains plausible deniability about his involvement in suspicious international incidents.

Alas, Harry and Marv no doubt died in the late 90s due to lingering complications from brain damage resulting from multiple instances of head trauma. 🙂

-JM