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The great thing about Christmas is you can do it exactly the same as you did last time, every single year. Case in point: 1992's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is basically and openly the same movie as 1990's megahit Home Alone. The main difference is that writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus moved the setting from a Chicago suburb to Manhattan.
Once again, Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is separated from his family and takes it upon himself to violently fend off a pair of crooks who are out to get him (Joe Pesci's and Daniel Stern's Harry and Marv were previously known as the Wet Bandits; now they are the Sticky Bandits). At the film's climax, he tortures them with the system of traps and guaranteed pratfalls that is, by now, his signature. Again, they improbably survive. The movie recycles the first installment's various minor gags with little variation, too. There are jokes about cousin Fuller's piss problem, another malfunctioning alarm clock, more of the same ruses proving that 10-year-old Kevin is way smarter than any adult he encounters, a terrifying old person with a heart of gold (Pesci's fellow Oscar winner, Brenda Fricker as the Pigeon Lady), new excuses for Kevin to bellow that now-famous scream, and a lovely cheese pizza. The second movie's box of ornaments is hung in virtually the same configuration as it was last time. It's all supposed to look just as charming.
When parents Peter (John Heard) and Kate (Catherine O'Hara, whose terrible haircut is among the most drastic changes in this sequel) discuss their lost son with the police in Miami, Kate jokingly refers to vacationing without their now-10-year-old as "a McCallister family tradition." And so it is: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York vividly illustrates the mind-numbing that comes from our traditions, the repetition that plays such a major role in our culture. It's not just in its content, but in the way audiences ate it up: 2 earned $100 million less than its predecessor ($285 million), but it still made $173 million. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $284 million, which would place it at No. 4 on 2012's cumulative chart.
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