Something more promising today with Christmas Break-In, a 2018 offering that's basically Home Alone, in a school, but with added Danny Glover as a kindly, heroic janitor. Cameron Seely is 9 year old Izzy who accidentally gets left at school in the middle of a blizzard when a gang of incompetent thieves decide to hide out there for the night. When the bandits take affable janitor Ray (Glover) hostage, it’s up to Izzy to save the day. It sounds a lot more exciting than it is.
It's a cool concept, but the script suffers from a real dearth of imagination. I go in expecting lots of cool booby traps and amusing scrapes but the film spends ages on the set-up and then devotes way too much following the antics of Izzy’s family who try to get her home for Christmas.
Denise Richards and Sean O’Bryan are Izzy’s parents who were meant to pick her up but are both so busy at work, they just forget about her. Home Alone at least had a semi-plausible, albeit convoluted reason for a kid to be abandoned at Christmas, but Izzy’s mum and dad are just plain dim and neglectful.
Glover, at least, brings a sense of gravitas to things as the wizened old blues-loving caretaker-cum-guitar teacher. He elevates things just by being there, spending every scene he's in telling old stories with warmth and a wry twinkle. My only disappointment is that he never once intones that he’s “gettin’ too old for this shit.”
The baddies are of the forgettable, slapstick idiot variety and, though the film drags a bit, there are hints that we’re building up to some satisfying villain-maiming mayhem. Frustratingly the film totally fumbles it. Instead of constructing some inventive, painful deathtraps, Izzy just turns the temperature down and wears a Halloween mask to make the dimwitted robbers think the place is haunted. Then she locks them in a cupboard. It's a rubbish anti-climax.
You know something’s wrong when the end credit bloopers are more fun than the actual film.
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