10 Opening Movie Scenes NOTHING Like The Rest Of The Film
5. Home Alone 3
The first two Home Alone movies may be plenty ridiculous, but they also do a fantastic job of immediately immersing us in the palpable chaos of the McCallister family, before of course young Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) is left to fend off two buffoonish thieves (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) by himself.
Home Alone 3 may get lumped in with its direct-to-video successors, yet despite Culkin not returning it actually had a theatrical release and a bigger budget than either of the first two movies.
This perhaps explains why the film features a bizarre and bloated opening sequence which sets up the convoluted circumstances through which Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz) has to defend his home from a quartet of dim-witted invaders.
In painfully protracted fashion, we see a group of terrorists attempting to smuggle a $10 million microchip through San Francisco International Airport by hiding it inside an RC car.
However, the luggage gets mixed up with an RC car intended for Alex, sending the criminals to his house in the hope of recovering the high-priced technology.
Except, the opening 10 minutes of the movie don't even remotely feel like a Home Alone film: the shadowy, tense chit-chat between the criminals and their associates feel more like a '90s tech-thriller than a comedy written by John Hughes.
Only after this bafflingly drawn-out opening do we finally meet Alex and the rest of the movie follows the series' more conventional blueprint - the bad guys getting knocked out and beaten up in a variety of creative ways.
It certainly feels more like a Home Alone movie after that opening scene - just not a very good one.