| Home Alone 2: Lost in New York | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Chris Columbus |
| Produced by | John Hughes |
| Written by | John Hughes |
| Starring | Macaulay Culkin Joe Pesci Daniel Stern Catherine O'Hara John Heard Brenda Fricker Tim Curry |
| Music by | John Williams |
| Cinematography | Julio Macat |
| Editing by | Raja Gosnell |
| Studio | Hughes Entertainment |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | November 20, 1992 |
| Running time | 120 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $20 million |
| Box office | $358,994,850[1] |
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is a 1992 American Christmas comedy film written and produced by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus. It is the second film in the Home Alone series and the direct sequel to Home Alone. The film stars Macaulay Culkin in the lead role as Kevin McCallister, while Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern reprise their roles as the Wet Bandits. Catherine O'Hara, John Heard, Devin Ratray, Kieran Culkin, Gerry Bamman, Tim Curry, Rob Schneider, Dana Ivey, and Brenda Fricker are also featured.
Eddie Bracken plays a minor role, while Ally Sheedy (who previously worked with Hughes in The Breakfast Club), Bob Eubanks, and Donald Trump make cameo appearances. The movie was filmed in Winnetka, Illinois, O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Miami and New York City (which was star Culkin's hometown at the time). Despite receiving mostly negative reviews from critics, the film became the second most successful film of 1992, earning over $173 million in revenue in the United States and over $358 million worldwide.
Home Alone 3 followed in 1997, and Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House followed in 2002. Culkin did not appear in either film nor did the rest of the cast.
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The McCallister family prepares to spend Christmas in Miami, Florida. Ten-year-old Kevin, Peter and Kate's youngest son, sees Florida as contradictory to what he thinks an appropriate Christmas environment is, particularly noting the lack of Christmas trees. During the school Christmas concert, Kevin's older brother Buzz humiliates him during his solo, causing Kevin to retaliate. Kevin refuses to apologize for his actions, and, still angry with the family's decision to go to Florida, he storms up to the third floor bedroom of the house, where he wishes that he had his own money so he could go on his own vacation by himself. That evening, Peter unknowingly resets the family's alarm clock, which causes them to oversleep. In the confusion and rush to reach the airport on time, Kevin gets onto a flight to New York, due to him loading his Talkboy with new batteries. The family does not realize they forgot Kevin until after they land in Florida. Meanwhile, in New York, Kevin tours the city and uses the Talkboy to check into the Plaza Hotel. However, he finds himself scared by the appearance of a woman tending to pigeons.
On Christmas Eve, Kevin tours the city in a limousine and visits Duncan's Toy Chest, a local toy store, where he meets the philanthropic owner, Mr. Duncan. There, Kevin discovers the proceeds from Christmas sales will be donated to a children's hospital. Mr. Duncan allows him to take a pair of ceramic turtledoves as a gift, instructing him to give one to another person as a sign of eternal friendship. Harry Lyme and Marv Merchants, the Wet Bandits, have escaped from prison and chase Kevin. He enters the hotel room, but Mr. Hector, the hotel concierge, confronts Kevin about the credit card, which came up as being stolen. Kevin flees, but is stopped by the bandits. They discuss plans of breaking into the toy store before Kevin escapes again and hides in the back of a hansom cab.
In Florida, the McCallister's discover that Kevin has been found using Peter's credit card in New York. The family flies to New York and Kate desperately tries to find Kevin. Having noted earlier that his uncle Rob has a townhouse in New York, Kevin attempts to visit him; but the house is vacant and undergoing renovations. In Central Park, he comes across the pigeon lady, only to get his foot caught while attempting to escape. After she frees him, they watch, from a loft above Carnegie Hall, a local symphony orchestra perform. Kevin learns how her life has fallen apart and how she dealt with it by taking care of the pigeons in the park; he promises to be her friend.
After leaving the hall, Kevin heads back to the townhouse and sets up various booby-traps for the bandits in the townhouse, and then arrives at the toy store during the break-in and throws a brick tied with a note to Mr. Duncan through the window to set off the store's alarm. The bandits follow him into the townhouse. After the two spring every trap in the house, Kevin flees to a phone booth and dials 911. The bandits catch Kevin when he slips on a patch of ice and take him to Central Park to kill him. The pigeon lady sneaks up behind them and throws birdseed on them while Kevin sets off fireworks he had bought earlier to signal the police. Shortly after, the bandits are arrested. At the toy store, Mr. Duncan finds Kevin's note and realizes his role in stopping the bandits.
Kate comes across two police officers in Times Square, and remembers Kevin's fondness for Christmas trees. Kevin makes a wish at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. He then sees Kate, and the two meet and reconcile. A truckload of gifts from the toy store comes to the Plaza Hotel on Christmas Day in the morning as a reward to Kevin's family for him foiling of the robbery. Buzz suggests that had it not been for Kevin getting on the wrong flight, they would not be in the suite with the Christmas tree and free gifts in the first place, and allows Kevin to open up the first present as a sign of reconciliation. During the festivities, however, Kevin goes to Central Park to give the pigeon lady a turtledove, reaffirming his promise. At the hotel, Cedric delivers Kevin's room service bill, totaling $967.43, to Buzz. Peter interrupts Kevin by calling out, "Kevin, you spent $967 on room service?", at which point Kevin runs back and the film ends.
In addition, a CD with excerpts from the score by John Williams was issued in 1992.[2] The track listing is as follows:
On the film's tenth anniversary, Varèse Sarabande released a two-disc special edition soundtrack, containing the previously noted cues along with additional compositions that were left out from the final film.[3]
The complete track listing is as follows:[3]
Disc One
Disc Two
The film opened to $31.1 million from 2,222 theaters, averaging $14,008 per site.[4] While it started off better than Home Alone, the final box office gross was much less.[5] $173,585,516 was taken in the United States and a total of $358,994,850 worldwide.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York received mainly negative reviews from film critics. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two out of four stars and stated that "cartoon violence is only funny in cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn't funny."[6] Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 24% based on reviews from 25 critics.[7]
The film was released on VHS on July 28, 1993.
It was later released on DVD on October 5, 1999 as a basic package, with no special features other than theatrical trailers for the film and its sequels. A Blu-ray version was released on October 6, 2009, with no features included.
As with the first Home Alone movie, video games based on the sequel were released by THQ for such systems as the Sega Mega Drive, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy and personal computers, mostly in late 1992. A separate hand-held game was released by Tiger Electronics.
The Talkboy handheld tape recorder that Kevin used in the film was actually a non-working prop. A huge letter-writing campaign by young fans of the film led Tiger Electronics to produce a fully functional retail version of the recorder in 1993, when the film was first released on home video. There was also an audiobook released by Harper Audio, which was read by Tim Curry.
As they had in the first film, American Airlines also had very prominent product-placement in Home Alone 2, with Kevin and his family completing their trip to Miami on an AA B767 (the first film's trip was on a DC-10).
Because the World Trade Center prominently featured at the beginning of the film, some TV companies made changes to the film when showing it on television after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Fox cut the scene with the World Trade Center out entirely when they showed the film on TV later that year.
The scene with the World Trade Center was not cut out of the 2009 DVD re-release of the film.
Angels with Even Filthier Souls is a fictional gangster film that appears within Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It is a sequel to the fictional Angels with Filthy Souls, which Kevin McCallister watches in the original Home Alone; he uses both films for similar purposes.
The only shown part of Filthier is when a woman named "Susie" appears and confesses to "Johnny" that she was having an affair and asks for forgiveness; but Johnny ends up shooting her. While being chased by Mr. Hector and the staff in the Plaza, Kevin plays a home video of it to trick the staff into thinking that there is an armed, dangerous man in the room.
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