The story
About Home Alone 3
Laid up at home with chickenpox, an eight-year-old boy ends up with a toy car that an international gang of spies has used to smuggle a stolen military microchip. When the four operatives come searching the houses on his street, nobody believes his warnings, so he turns the family home into a gauntlet of booby traps to defend it himself. Unlike the rest of the series, the story unfolds in the snowy weeks after Christmas rather than over the holiday.
The CineClaus verdict
Barely a Christmas film at all.
The action starts in the weeks after the holiday, and nothing in the plot needs tinsel. What it offers instead is softer slapstick than the first two instalments and a natural, likeable lead in Alex D. Linz, with a young Scarlett Johansson as his sister.
Grown-ups will find the spy caper thin and the traps samey by the last act. Children who have worn out the Macaulay Culkin films and still want more booby traps are the audience here, and they will probably have a whale of a time.
The family desk
Can the kids watch?
Our take: rated PG. Cartoonish slapstick throughout, though the villains carry guns and one neighbour is left tied up in the cold, so it suits most children of seven and up who coped fine with the original.
BBFC advice: Frequent slapstick violence and mild language.
Content advice & accessibility
- Where the advice comes from
- The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), checked .
- Our age guidance
- Editorial, separate from the official PG certificate, and never looser than it.
