‘The Good Son’: the twisted unofficial sequel to ‘Home Alone’
It would be fair to say that there’s no Home Alone without Macaulay Culkin, even if 20th Century Fox and subsequently Disney decided to churn out another four entries in the franchise anyway. For an unofficial follow-up starring the same actor, though, The Good Son takes things in a much darker direction.
Each and every year, without fail, the festive season sees Kevin McCallister’s adventures revisited en masse, with the Culkin-fronted duo remaining as popular now as they’ve ever been. It’s impressive longevity considering Home Alone and its sequel Lost in New York combined to earn almost $850million at the box office and turn the actor into a generation-defining child star over 30 years ago, but it’s best to pretend things ended there.
Home Alone 3 and 4, Home Alone: The Holiday Heist, and Home Sweet Home Alone bear little resemblance in terms of wit, warmth, humour, and anarchic spirit to their illustrious predecessors. However, Hollywood has never been a place where a marketable brand is allowed to sit on the shelf and gather dust for too long.
However, enterprising theorists out there have taken it upon themselves to decree director Joseph Ruben’s The Good Son as a direct continuation of Kevin’s arc, even if it takes a pinch of salt. The psychological thriller was released less than a year after Home Alone 2, and it was a major departure for Culkin in every respect.
He shot to fame as the cheery, cherubic star of family-friendly comedies and tear-jerking dramas, but every performer has to evolve eventually. Co-starring Elijah Wood, the story finds the future Lord of the Rings star (playing Mark) moving in with his extended family after his mother passes away and his father tends to business elsewhere.
That puts him under the same roof as Culkin’s Henry, but when Mark witnesses his cousin cruelly kill the neighbour’s dog and deliberately cause a traffic accident with multiple casualties, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong with the youngster. Mark then faces a desperate race against time to reveal Henry for the monster he truly is before it’s too late, which sounds absolutely nothing like Home Alone at all. Or does it?
Having already been left to his own devices twice over and caused chaos when maiming would-be thieves, it’s not that much of a stretch to connect one Culkin vehicle to the next. Sure, he’s got a completely different name, but based on his Home Alone antics, it’s not exactly out of the question that the McCallisters could conceivably forget about him a third time, with the consequences much more dire.
For talking’s sake, let’s say Kevin does end up home alone again. He takes things too far and gets placed into either protective custody, witness protection, or child services and is eventually taken in by the Evans clan. With his taste for the malevolent already well established by this point, the relocation ends up sending him down the darkest possible path and boom, The Good Son is the murderous and completely believable sequel to Home Alone 2.
