Home Sweet Home Alone Mixes Parasite With The Original Movie (Badly)

Home Sweet Home Alone Mixes Parasite With The Original Movie (Badly)

A class clashing home invasion thriller pits the rich against a poor, antiheroic family. Parasite, or Disney+ Home Alone reboot Home Sweet Home Alone?

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Home Sweet Home Alone Mixes Parasite With The Original Movie (Badly)

The Disney+ reboot Home Sweet Home Alone attempts to combine elements from 2020’s Oscar phenomenon Parasite with the original Home Alone, but it’s an ambitious failure. Home Alone was a huge hit upon its 1990 release and the Christmas classic remains one of the most financially successful comedy movies of all time. The stellar ensemble cast drove the movie’s largely positive critical reception but, outside of Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, and Catherine O’Hara’s turns, the irresistibly simple premise of Home Alone was equally responsible for the movie’s outsized success.

Stranding a spoiled young antihero alone at Christmas, the original Home Alone mixed the sentimental story of Kevin McAllister learning to appreciate his family with the slapstick hijinks of him protecting his home from thieves. It was a basic but effective setup, uncomplicated by moral ambiguity or social commentary. Kevin was a little rude and precocious, but he was a small child up against violent, sadistic (if incompetent) criminals, meaning Home Alone’s stakes and sympathies were easy to discern.

In contrast, the Disney+ reboot Home Sweet Home Alone makes the daring and ultimately misguided decision to combine the child-friendly simplicity of this original story with a morally murky new plot that borrows from director Bong Joon Ho’s satire Parasite (of all places). Home Sweet Home Alone’s perspective switch sees the reboot take place partially from the POV of the robbers who, in this incarnation, are a surprisingly sympathetic young couple who have fallen on hard times. Home Sweet Home Alone’s terrible trailer reception already made it clear that the reboot was never destined to win over fans of the originals, but attempting to make the movie a piece of class-conscious social commentary did not help its cause.

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To make the Home Alone reboot’s morality more clear-cut and child-friendly than Parasite, Home Sweet Home Alone’s cash-strapped duo are retrieving an heirloom that the Kevin stand-in Max stole from their open house. So, unlike in the Bong Joon Ho movie, no viewer could claim that the thieves are taking advantage of the wealthier clan. However, being a kids movie means Home Sweet Home Alone also has to make Max and his rich family its heroes, meaning the reboot has no clear hero or villain. As proven by The Simpsons’ many Christmas episodes, family-friendly satire can work even if set in the usually saccharine festive season, and it is possible to use a Christmas setting as an opportunity to comment on issues like income inequality.

However, the strength of Parasite came from how ruthless its satire was. The wealthy Park family is atrociously cruel to the working class Kim family but the Kim family also repeatedly deceive them to survive, and the Kims are just us cruel to the extremely poor former housekeeper and her husband. No one comes out clean, since Parasite’s message is that the system itself is a socially corrosive force, an idea that Home Sweet Home Alone is poorly equipped to revisit. The choice to pit a wealthy family against poorer antiheroes in a home invasion plot makes Home Sweet Home Alone’s Parasite borrows feel intentional, but the Home Alone reboot’s toothlessness proves that referencing the successful satire was a misjudged choice.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/home-alone-reboot-parasite-class-satire-story-failed-why/

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