Now that Thanksgiving is over with and it’s officially the Christmas season, can I just point out how messed up Kevin from Home Alone is?
You have this eight-year-old kid who is the youngest of this big family and feels like he’s always ignored and gets into fights with his family and so forth. That’s normal. At one point he wishes his entire family would disappear, which you can’t give him too much crap for, because he is eight and his entire family was ragging on him. The thing is that he wakes up after being sent away to sleep in the attic and his entire family is gone. He then rejoices at this and cues the montage of newfound freedom.
What makes this disturbing is that his first thought isn’t “They must have accidentally left me and went on that vacation we had planned;” no, it’s actually “My wish for my family to disappear came true." Now, you can say that he is eight and has an active imagination or whatever, but they had probably been planning this trip for months. It’s the reason why his entire family was over at his house, plus he was sleeping in the attic alone. It’s not that hard for someone to connect the dots.
While I do admire that his second thought is to go out and get groceries to take care of himself, does he not think about how an unsupervised kid at a supermarket does look somewhat suspicious? Plus, if he is still assuming that his parents are actually gone, does he not think of the situations where he’ll actually need an adult? He’s eight; he hasn’t really been taught how to use an oven. Admittedly, he does seem to get past these hurdles, saying his mom is waiting in the car for him when the cashier questions him. The main food he eats is ice cream, which really doesn’t need that much preparation, but he couldn’t really survive in the long-term if his parents were actually wished away.
Now the main messed up part is how many traps this kid has set for these burglars and that he has traps set up for these guys at all. Sure, you could justify some of them, but did he really need all of these extensive traps that are kinda advanced for an eight-year-old to come up with? Plus, some of these traps are straight up dangerous. The guy gets hit in the face WITH A HOT IRON. Jesus Christ, kid! Where do you come up with this stuff?? I get that he had to lure them into the house so that they would get caught robbing it, but there was a point where Kevin could have just let them break in and then called the cops. I’m pretty sure he enjoyed torturing those burglars a little too much.
Also, at the end of the movie, he doesn’t tell any of his family members about this dangerous thing that happened to him. Wouldn’t a cop inform his parental guardians about how Kevin was a witness to a crime? Wouldn’t this capture of two infamous thieves by a child be on the news? Is there not a reward? I mean, Kevin lived in a very wealthy neighborhood that was being robbed. I feel like there would be a reward. Also, what’s even more ridiculous is that there is a Home Alone 2, where his parents forget him AGAIN. If you forget a kid the first time, he’s the one you immediately check on whenever there’s a point where you may have forgotten something. I’m pretty sure his parents just handcuff one of themselves to him whenever they go on vacation because that’s the only way they can’t lose him.
Don’t get me wrong; although I criticize it, Home Alone is one of my favorite Christmas movies, and I’m probably going to watch it at least twice in the next month.