Everyone, at some point in their life, has seen Home Alone. That’s not even an opinion, it’s a stone cold fact. It’s just one of those movies that you can’t avoid, especially around the holidays.
If you’re like me, you watch comedy movies while you mouth breath and you don’t really put too much thought into what is happening. Some people, however, can’t sit idly by and allow themselves to stare at a gaping plot hole without making a stink about it on Reddit.
And apparently Home Alone has a plot gash worth making a stink about.
Per one Redditor who posted in the thread “What’s a movie plot hole so big, you could drive a truck through it?” :
Home Alone: The entire plot relies on Kevin’s parents being unable to call home to speak to their son, after the phone service to their house is severed by a falling tree. Kevin, however, is somehow able to call Little Nero’s to deliver his very own cheese pizza; this is never explained. It serves no purpose but to set up the use of the “Angels with Dirty Souls” tape later in the film. Still love the movie though!
Another user offered this explanation:
“I always assumed the tree actually severed the main trunk line to the whole town, but local calls within the same exchange still worked.”
Turns out, this is actually a logical explanation to why young Kevin could make a local call to order pizza, but his father couldn’t call him from overseas. How do I know that? Because I moonlight as a motherfucking phone technician, DUH.
Actually, I know that because The Huffington Post went the extra mile to ask an actual phone company about it. Talk about really giving a shit about something no one with anything better to do should give a shit about…
Per AT&T Vice President-Federal Regulatory Hank Hultquist:
“Everything is changing now because all of this phone capability is moving into the cloud, but in 1990, that was absolutely a plausible scenario.”
Let me ask you this, Hank: Is it as plausible as an entire family leaving for vacation and forgetting that they left one of their small children home until they were 35,000 feet in the air and could do nothing about it? And then, have that same small child realize that a burglary duo called the Wet Bandits planned to rob his family blind while they were away on vacation so he became an ARMY OF ONE and concocted a linty of harebrained booby traps that actually thwarted the Wet Bandits plans? I don’t know, Hank, compared to all of that, the phone thing seems pretty implausible if you ask me.