Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)

The Home Alone franchise reaches its sixth installment with the weary inevitability of a fruitcake surfacing each December. This one, produced for Disney+, inverts the original arrangement: the child is an entitled brat, the burglars are a financially pressed married couple, and we are invited to sympathize with the adults trying to reclaim a doll with an upside-down face. Nearly an hour passes before anyone steps on a toy. The slapstick, when it arrives, is dutiful. The film knows the notes and plays them without conviction.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and honesty requires saying so. The casting is diverse in the unremarkable contemporary manner, with Kenan Thompson as a put-upon officer and a mixed-race couple in the supporting ranks, and none of these performers are asked to carry any argument about identity. Pam earns the household income while her husband hunts for work, a detail the screenplay treats as ordinary domestic weather. The McKenzies stand to lose their house, and the brother who has thrived is drawn as a preening fool, which lends the proceedings a faint odor of economic resentment. It never gathers into a thesis. There is no sermonizing, no moral attached to the mayhem, no lecture waiting at the end of the hallway.

What is left is a workmanlike reanimation of a corpse that was already stiff in 1990. The film is billed as a fresh chapter and functions as a facsimile. Critics were merciless, and Chris Columbus, who directed the first two, asked publicly what the point of it was. A fair question, posed with the bluntness of a man who has nothing left to sell. The result is a low-yield vintage, drinkable, forgettable, and best left on the shelf until next December, when it will be poured again regardless.