Disney's Latest Franchise Revival Bomb, HOME SWEET HOME ALONE - Trailer

[AndyDursin]

12K downvotes and counting.

[jkholm]

My son decided to watch this last night, more as a sarcastic “this is going to be stupid” idea then any conviction that it would be good. I was in the other room listening to most of it and then actually watched the last twenty minutes. As you would expect, it’s not very good, a shameless rip-off of the original with poor direction and lame jokes. The actors do their best but you can only do so much with a bad script. A couple things stood out to me. First, the slapstick violence and Rube Goldberg booby traps were OK as concepts but mostly fell flat. No one would ever consider Chris Columbus to be a directing genius but the impact of the traps in the original movies was visceral. I still wince at some of the pratfalls. But when characters fall to the ground in this new movie, they just…fall to the ground. I never gave much thought to how these scenes are directed and edited in the originals but clearly there’s a right way and a wrong way to put together a scene that’s both funny and cartoonishly violent. The director of the new movie is not adept in this area. There are also a few traps with distracting use of CGI. (I did laugh at one of the new traps, as dumb as it was.)

The other thing is the music. John Debney has the thankless job of composing a temp-track score that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike John Williams’ original. The whole thing is bizarre. Clearly the producers licensed some of Williams’ music (he gets onscreen credit) but maybe not all of it? There are times when the original melodies are used verbatim but others when Debney writes a melody that starts out the exact same way but then veers off into a totally different direction. It’s disconcerting to hear the opening notes of “Somewhere in My Memory” only to have it wander off into something else. If you’re going to pay to use William’s themes, why not use them consistently?

[mkaroly]

^^Sounds like something akin to John Ottman's Superman Returns. Lol...