Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012)

Directed by Peter Hewitt. Starring Christian Martyn, Malcolm McDowell, Eddie Steeples, Debi Mazar, Bill Turnbull, Jodelle Ferland, Ellie Harvie, Doug Murray, Ed Asner, Peter DaCunha.

Feeble effort to beat a dead horse centers on a different family again, newly arrived at a house in Maine. Utterly uninteresting tyke Martyn, friendless and obsessed with video games, is left home alone with his older sister (Ferland) while the parents are attending a Christmas party; that night, a trio of crooks try to break in to steal an extremely valuable painting, and you see where this is going. The closest the filmmakers come to a twist on the exhausted material is making the burglars think the house is haunted instead of merely occupied by some snot-nosed-yet-unbelievably-resourceful kid, but the angle is hardly exploited at all by the insipidly mundane script. Even the “traps” (the only reason this franchise keeps coughing along on fumes) are embarrassingly uninventive in this witless time-waster that has all the care, quality, and value of a run-of-the-mill TV-movie debuting on basic cable…perhaps because it did premiere on ABC Family. Even by his latter-career, at-least-there’s-a-paycheck standards, McDowell is really slumming it here.

15/100