Home Alone 3 (1997)
Directed by Raja Gosnell
9-year-old Alex Pruitt is home alone with the chicken pox. Turns out, due to a mix-up among nefarious spies, Alex was given a toy car concealing a top-secret microchip. Now Alex must fend off the spies as they try to break into his house to get it back.
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What critics compared Home Alone 3 to
Raja Gosnell (who previously directed the timeless Home Alone 3 ) directs the film like one of those airport runway workers with the large lighted paddles he just wigwags a seemingly endless line of sitcom-level gags past the audience in hopes that something will eventually register.
And surely the concept of a man in drag in search of himself is not news, here refitted by writers Darryl Quarles (Soldier Boyz) and Don Rhymer and director Raja Gosnell (Never Been Kissed, Home Alone 3) into a series of mostly unrelated scenes that showcase Lawrence's comedic flexibility and charisma.
Director Raja Gosnell, a longtime film editor who also helmed "Home Alone 3" (mind you, I don't think I knew there was a "Home Alone 3"), keeps the comic beats coming, transforming Darryl Quarles and Don Rhymer's predictable screenplay into an efficient gag-delivery system.
Lawrence excels as Big Momma, and rises above the film's unremarkable direction (care of Raja Gosnell, of Home Alone 3 fame), substandard dialogue (screenplay by Darryl Quarles and Don Rhymer), and a plot cribbed mercilessly from Kindergarten Cop.
As directed by Raja Gosnell (also responsible for the grating "Never Been Kissed" and "Home Alone 3"), Darryl Quarles and Don Rhymer's formulaic script is most amusing when the hook is pushed to the extreme, such as when the fake Big Momma kicks butt in a women's self-defense class or hangs on the rim after stuffing a basketball in a street pick-up game.
More often than not he fights a losing battle against insipid jokes, sloppy direction by Raja Gosnell (who called the shots on the similarly lame "Home Alone 3") and all-around dopiness.
Voiced by Alex D. Linz (Home Alone 3), he's relentlessly cute and whitebread, getting into mischief with his wisecracking gorilla pal Terk (Rosie O'Donnell) and his neurotic elephant buddy Tantor (Taylor Dempsey), invariably angering Kerchak (Lance Henriksen), invariably being consoled by his mother.
Inspiring minimal confidence is the director of "Big Momma's House" and "Home Alone 3", Raja Gosnell, and James Gunn, the writer behind a couple of Troma films and "The Specials".
Gosnell exposed his witless comedy before in "Big Momma's House" and "Home Alone 3"--admittedly, big moneymakers--and here he drains all the potential out of the Scooby premise to carve out this hollow kids' movie.
But the whole enterprise is directed by editor-turned-director Raja Gosnell (Big Mama's House, Never Been Kissed, Home Alone 3).
I'd like to kiss the idiot who picked Raja Gosnell, director of clumsy "comedy" crap such as Big Momma's House and Home Alone 3, for finding the only director who could possibly make James Gunn's writing appear worse than it actually is.