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The homeless are there to help us, not the other way around

Home Alone 2 has a very special place in my heart since it was one of the first films to teach me that a sequel to a popular movie doesn't need to have any new ideas, but just be an exact replica of the first in a new location. Most of the elements from the original Home Alone that are retained are harmless, even though the script occasionally strains to explain why, for example, the villains from the first film are back and now in New York, but the most awkward is probably the inclusion of an older, slightly scary but ultimately warmhearted character who saves Kevin at the end.

In the first film, this role was fulfilled by an old man who carries around a shovel. The character is weird and slightly creepy, but he seems to have a life outside of the story of the film. For the second film, writer John Hughes decided that the helper character should be a homeless woman named Kate who is constantly covered by pigeons, a decision which gets increasingly uncomfortable as the story progresses, since it raises and trivializes the struggle of the underclass whilst also making Kevin seem like a callow and heartless youth who has no empathy for other people. This starts about halfway through the film when Kevin teams up with Kate for the first time, and says that he realized she was nice because pigeons are always hanging out with her, and they wouldn't do that if she wasn't a good person. This ignores the fact that, being homeless, she probably reeks of fetid human waste, and by Kevin's logic, Kate and a dead rat are morally equitable because of the ease with which they both attract scavenger birds.

Later, though, the sense of distance between Kevin and the entirety of humanity becomes more stark in a scene in which the two share a tender moment in the rafters of an opera house. I say "tender" because what the scene largely amounts to is the two discussing their problems, but since Kevin's main problem is that he has a big family and sometimes he gets lost in the shuffle and Kate's main problem is that she hasn't got a fucking home, it comes off as a little shallow, like a college student spending a year abroad complaining about his girl troubles to a man who lost his family in a genocide. It's meant to be heartwarming and to give Kevin a sense of perspective, but Culkin so completely fails to pull it off that he just comes across as a bit of a prick, and by the end of the scene I found myself screaming, "Don't just leave her; give her one of your cookies so that she can fucking eat, you little shit!" at the screen.

Their final scene together, in which Kevin gives Kate a porcelain Turtle Dove so that they'll never forget each other, rings especially false, since whilst he gets to spend Christmas day in a swanky hotel suite with his entire family, then fly back to his massive house in Michigan, she remains homeless, and as a result will probably freeze to death once the harsh winter takes its toll.


We Need To Talk About Kevin McCallister

Viewed from the point of view of Kevin McCallister, Home Alone 2 is a light-hearted romp in which a plucky scamp thwarts a couple of burglars and saves Christmas. Viewed from the perspective of Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), Home Alone 2 is basically Saw. Now, the film takes its time getting to that point, initially having Kevin commit "harmless" acts of violence like causing them to slip on ice or tricking a woman into punching them in the face, but once he lures them to an abandoned house that he has converted into a torture palace that the Cenobites from Hellraiser would have been proud of, it makes the leap into pure, visceral horror.

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