When John Hughes came up with that Home Alone idea nearly a decade ago it was fresh, spontaneous and quite a delight. Not today. Macaulay Culkin is now 16 and to be married and too old for the part, but that's not the reason behind the failure. Alex D Linz of One Fine Day fame is cute enough. But old wine in new bottles gets sour and the situations contrived. It is very much like flogging a long dead horse.

The storyline is thin. A top secret computer chip designed for a missile guidance system is stolen and whoever possesses this chip could dominate the entire region. The North Koreans (the Russians have been spared, thankfully) are the suspected villains but the chip is hidden in a toy which eventually leads to our little hero Alex Pruitt (Alex D Linz) in a quiet suburb of Chicago. If two heads are better than one, four villains are not necessarily better than two, and I'd rather opt for the old baddies Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci. These four led by Olek Krupaand comprising a female too, Rya Kihlstedt, may look more sophisticated but when all they have to do is make asses of themselves, the sophistication is lost.

Raja Gosnell, who edited the first two Home Alone films, makes his directorial debut, and he does what is expected of him. Unfortunately what he does is also expected by the viewer. The talking parrot and the cute white mouse may provide a shade of variety but that's about all. Only a shade. The slapstick in the last quarter gets heavy and makes the silent movie era seem modern. And the cameos, like the quarrelsome siblings (shades of The Wonder Years but not as good) are poor and the mother, Haviland Morris, quite colourless.

In fact, the entire film is dull, predictable and a conglomeration of gags that would amuse a sort of backward child, not one who has grown up on the spontaneous hilarity of the parent film. Sometimes Hollywood doesn't know when to stop.