The Truth About Home Alone: It's Just a Bad Movie With Too Many Plot Holes
Watching Home Alone as an adult is like trying to patch up a sinking ship with duct tape and a prayer... it's just full of holes.
Home Alone was a pretty entertaining comedy… for kids. However, when you rewatch it as an adult, you cannot help but notice an ever-growing number of plot holes, which severely impact your ability to enjoy it.
Certainly, some of them can be explained away by standard genre conventions – for example, superhuman resilience to injuries is extremely common in comedies, when those injuries are supposed to be, well, comedic.
And some seeming plot holes may be chalked off to misunderstanding the age, which already had many methods of long-range communication, but in which communications were nowhere as widespread or all-permeating as today. Back then it was at least theoretically possible to have long-range communications down, with local phones still working.
But a number of plot turns is just inexplicable and dumb.
For example, maybe you remember the "Kevin!!!" gag with Kevin's parents mulling over what they might have forgotten at home, only to figure out that they are short a kid mid-flight over Atlantic? But even by the permissive comedy standards this is nonsense – on what sort of an airline they might have failed to discover that fact at the moment of having to present their plane tickets during embarkation?
And speaking of tickets, how come Kevin's mom couldn't get a ticket from Scranton to Chicago?
Why no one ever tries to call the cops, neither Kevin, nor the pizza delivery guy, nor even the shovel old man? Why, in fact, the old man, the police and everybody in the town still ignores the fact that Kevin is home alone, even after he fights off the whole robber invasion? And how the house is not in ruins at the movie's end?
Sure, Kevin is a hard-working kid, but cleaning up everything after the robber shenanigans would have been a difficult task for a hard-working adult.
Sure, Home Alone is a popcorn flick with an inherently ridiculous comedic premise, and you're sort of supposed to not engage your brain too much (or, again, be a kid) when watching. But it is not supposed to be an absurdist comedy. The world allegedly works on our familiar rules, with only your normalized cinematic breaks from reality… except when the plot demands otherwise.