The kid can get in lots of trouble.' Hughes' reputation was still riding high by the time of the first Home Alone, even if audiences' tolerance for his high school teenage archetypes was wearing thin (Heathers contains all the proof you'll need of this). He wrote multiple drafts of the screenplay, and chose New York specifically on the grounds that it was 'a great place to lose him. What's perplexing about this is that screenwriter John Hughes put a lot of effort into writing the sequel. Even with a rushed production schedule - during which time a number of the crew's cameras froze while filming the Christmas scenes - there is no excuse for such an appalling attitude. It even goes so far as deliberately re-staging or replicating the same physical or visual gags as the first film, grotesquely overconfident that lightning will strike twice. It makes precisely zero effort to innovate, either in its plot or its gags, because it presumes that people will pay to see it regardless of the content on the basis that the original was so popular. The single biggest problem with Home Alone 2 (as it will hereafter be known) is the contempt it shows for its target audience. Fish-out-of-water stories can become tiresome very quickly if they're not anchored itoeither a witty script or good performances, but at the very least., most films which go down this route at least make an effort to emphasise the differences in culture, even if it's just a passing, off-hand comment about how fast people move or the fact that there's no phone signal. It's a common tactic among either sequels or spin-off projects to take familiar characters and put them in a new situation - it's a trick that's been tried on everything from Are You Being Served?: The Movie to Sex and the City 2. But even after more than 15 years, it's quite staggering how little effort went into bringing anything new to the table, and even on nostalgic terms it's at the very best hanging on the original's coattails. The career-making success of the original film, for both its star Macaulay Culkin and its director Chris Columbus, meant that a follow-up was as inevitable as the tides.

If Beverly Hills Cop II was the most blatant (and contemptuous) example of 'more of the same' that the 1980s could offer, than Home Alone 2: Lost in New York deserves the same crown for the 1990s. Everything that can be recycled is recycled, so that beat for beat and plot point for plot point, there is almost nothing between the two films' - nothing, that is, unless you count Tony Scott's penchant for explosions and bare flesh. I described it as Simpson and Bruckheimer 'at their most lazy and cynical. In my review of Beverly Hills Cop II, I spoke at great length about Hollywood's tendency to demand 'more of the same' when faced with a successful film - whether that success was anticipated or not.

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