Home Alone 3 (1997)

While the story is once again written by John Hughes, the directorial duties are this time taken over by Raja Gosnell. While it's not an absolutely terrible movie, this sequel to the first two, hugely successful, films suffers from a few major problems.

Problem one – no Macaulay Culkin. He may not be the best, or even cutest, kid actor in the world but Culkin was the undeniable star of the Home Alone movies and so setting up a story in which some other kid (young Alex, played by Alex D. Linz) has to stay at home on his own thanks to a case of the measles just isn't going to please those who wanted more of Culkin's antics.

Problem two – no Daniel Stern or Joe Pesci. The baddies of the piece are a bunch of agents (three men and one woman) who are after a special chip that has been placed in a remote control car given to Alex by one of his neighbours. The actors all do fairly well with their roles but they're no match for the gut-busting physical comedy that Stern was able to showcase in the previous films.

Problem three – it stretches believability, even for a Home Alone movie, in places and the complexity of some of the booby traps here make the kid look more like a new MacGyver than a new Macaulay.

But for those not feeling overly precious about things and willing to give it a go, these problems can also be turned around and viewed as positive. At least with a different kid as the focus of the attention we don't have to try to believe that the same thing would keep happening again and again to little Kevin McCallister and Alex D. Linz is quite a likable little moppet so that also works in the film's favour.

And while we're lacking "The Wet/Sticky Bandits" we at least get double the amount of victims trying to navigate their way through numerous, inventive booby-traps. Olek Krupa, Rya Kihlstedt, Lenny von Dohlen and David Thornton may have weaker material to work with but they still provide a good mix of menace and idiocy.

The other big bonus for the movie is that, although it's inherently repetitive when compared to the concept of it's predecessors, it doesn't identically replicate moments as the second film did. This means that things feel familiar but also a little fresher this time around.

The cast all do well enough and there's the lovely Haviland Morris playing Alex's mother while a very young Scarlett Johansson appears in the role of big sis, so completist fans may be interested in this for that reason alone.

Director Gosnell doesn't do anything spectacular but he's far from incompetent and paces the film well while leading everyone towards that big, trap-laden finale that we all want to see. An easy film for fans of the first two to be harsh towards, this actually makes for mildly amusing family fun and I'm sure it would keep some kids happy on a dreary afternoon stuck indoors. Though it would never be a first choice.