Home Alone 3

No one should be that rich! This boy left home alone owns more gear and lives in a house full of more gadgets than any person should ever want or own. It's the American dream gone mad. It's excessive commercialism.

I'm not altogether a purist on this either. Sometimes greediness can be fun in the movies. Richie Rich had his own personal McDonalds, inside his own house! That's the stuff of fantasy and good fun. Richie Rich also starred Macaulay Culkin, the boy at home in the first two of the Home Alone series.

But the Home Alone series hinges so heavily upon the unfair distribution of wealth that it's intensely annoying. And let's not forget another cause for complaint; the violence that is delivered with such gusto to those poor crooks, who's main crime has always been that they have the audacity to threaten the belongings of this little Cresus.

Home Alone 3 stars cute 8 year old Alex D. Linz, now that young Macca has grown far too old for the part. Linz was the young boy in One Fine Day opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney.

In Home Alone 3 young Alex has mistakenly acquired a valuable computer chip from European gangsters (I think they might be Spanish), who have the temerity to want it back from our little American icon.

The tried and true Home Alone format ensues, all three Home Alone films have been written by the same John Hughes. The boy sets his traps and the crooks dutifully fall into them.

These bumbling super crook foreigners get zapped by electrical traps, hit by flower pots and dumbbells, stuck with glue and dunked in freezing water, just as we've come to expect in these films.

Little Alex D. Linz is as cute as a kitten and the crooks get their just deserts in a fairly entertaining manner, although there isn't a stunt to match the famous bricks in the head episode when Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern were the hapless fall guys in Home Alone 2.

The baddies have no hope. Children will again love the way this little boy gets to control things. But young Alex is much nicer than Macaulay ever was. Macaulay had a devilish glint to his eye that is not in evidence with Alex, who can't help but stay adorable.

The format of this particular view showing of Home Alone 3 was interesting. We got what seemed to be the American version with the Spanish subtitles left on the screen! When the crooks spoke in Spanish, Home Alone 3 was dubbed into American!

Is this a foretaste of the new world order? Is this the latest evidence of the quick march into globalisation? Have the moguls in charge of the distribution of films decided to save money by not bothering to take the subtitles off the Australian version films?

Time will tell.