Home Alone minus the laughs
Calgary director co-writes murderous tale of booby-traps and baseball bats
The 1990 classic Home Alone is a family film, a comedy and a holiday movie. But what if it were none of those things?
Then it would be Knuckleball, in which a 12-year-old boy is dropped off at his grandfather’s remote farm in the dead of winter ( but not Christmas!) while his parents fly to a family funeral in another city. When gramps also departs, young Henry uses booby-traps to defend himself against a murderous neighbour. Hilarity could ensue, but doesn’t.
Calgary director and co-writer Michael Peterson has a great eye for casting, putting the inscrutable Luca Villacis in the role of the kid, and former Degrassi regular Munro Chambers as Dixon, the killer next door.
He also gives us as Grandpa Jacob ’80s legend Michael Ironside, whose line readings sometimes skirt perilously close to comedy. When Henry notices the frozen body of a dog under a tarp, Jacob explains that he found his beloved mutt out by the edge of the property. “It had been ... (long pause) ... it was dead.”
There’s also something almostbut-not-quite-funny in the notion of Henry, a budding baseball pitcher, squaring off against
Dixon, whose weapon of choice is a bat; we haven’t seen that kind of matchup since Slaughter versus Klinger in the World Series. (And yes, I have been waiting since 1946 to make that joke.)
Knuckleball isn’t without its problems, mind you. Henry’s mom is beset by weird flashbacks (pigeons, a rope, a shoe, etc.) that add little to the already heightened sense of dread, and only serve to make us wonder why she would leave her kid in a place that makes her so uneasy. And there’s a late-in-the-game twist that also seems extraneous to the mostly pared-down story.
On the plus side, Peterson crafts a chilling homage to The Shining; handles the whydoesn’t-he-use-his-cellphone question nicely; and delivers a decent followup to his last feature, 2011’s Lloyd the Conqueror, a comedy about live-action role play. Never let it be said that he repeats himself.