Home Sweet Home Alone is a weirdly embittered film with a very unproductive sense of structure. 

Whether it be the heinous attempts at embracing self-awareness or the lazy conformation to foregoing tropes, this is a putrid little Christmas film. Strangely Home Alone 5 got a lot right and it seemed they had finally worked out how to rework this franchise in an inoffensive way. Unfortunately Home Sweet Home Alone deserts the reliable Home Alone structure and everything falls apart. First of all, the kid is incredibly unlikeable, and to no fault of Archie Yates. The writing is alarmingly bad and as such the protagonist comes off as extremely unpleasant. The focus is on the robbers and they’re given a very sympathetic story arc, which not only helps make the protagonist more unlikeable but makes the booby trap sequences uncomfortable and unfunny. 

The dialogue is consistently unnatural, at one point they try to develop a cognisant sense by having a character criticise remakes of classics, which wasn’t as funny or meta as the filmmakers probably imagined it to be. This is around the same length as the original Home Alone and yet it’s very rushed in every way, there’s no time given to build atmosphere or family dynamic and as such everything feels very cold throughout the film. The product placement is embarrassing, it’s used in some important scenes and just shows how lazy and unbothered the studio are. The editing might’ve been excusable on Kids TV in the 80s but for a fairly big budgeted film it’s horrendous. The scenes with Aisling Bea are sparse and as meaningless as the films disillusioned message.