Goofs

The night Harry and Marv break in to the house, Kevin sits down and blesses his macaroni and cheese dinner just before the stroke of nine. This draws obvious attention to his plate. Later, just before Harry is covered with feathers, you can see a completely different plate with three sections of food on it.

Kevin has a pizza delivered to the house even though the phones are supposed to down. There is never any indication of if or when the phones were restored.

When Kevin goes across the street to his neighbors house entering though the flooded basement his clothes are soaked as he rushes up the stairs. In the next scene where he goes though the door to run into Harry and Marv his clothes are dry.

When the McCallisters take off for Paris Orly from Chicago O'Hare, they are on board a McDonnell-Douglas DC-10, a tri-jet. When they land in Paris, they are on board a Boeing 757, a twin jet. Given that flight appears to be non-stop, the fact that they took off in a plane with three engines and landed in a plane with two engines is an error.

Kevin purchases a large bottle of laundry detergent at the grocery store. While walking home, the two plastic grocery bags he is carrying burst spilling their contents. The bottle of detergent is not among the contents that spill.

When Kate calls the police from France, the woman answers the phone "Village police," but when the officer goes to the McCallister home, he clearly has a City of Chicago flag on the right shoulder of his jacket.

Kevin manages to set up all of his traps in less than 1 hour. Several of those traps would take at least an hour to be completed. For instance, the water on the porch and basement steps would not freeze into a thick layer of ice within one hour.

Commercial flights from North America to Europe depart in the evening, not in the morning or afternoon.

The plane shown landing at the Scranton Airport is a McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Airport has never had regular service from a DC-10 by any airline. The largest planes to land at Scranton are Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s. DC-10s are far too large to be accommodated by the airport for non-emergency situations.

When Harry & Marv are hit by the paint cans the next shot shows Kevin standing several feet to the right of the stairs with the ropes attached to the bannister. There is no way they could swing straight down the stairs from where they are attached.

When Kevin is having a flashback of his family yelling at him, we see Linnie turn around and go down the stairs. When this actually happens, we don't see her turn around at all. However, the other flashback visions were also not shown exactly as they had happened earlier in the film. They were all a little exaggerated as usually happens in a child's mind but could also be a result of the frailty of human memory in general.

The house loses power in the night from the falling tree branch. This causes them to oversleep. The power gets restored before they leave, obviously, because we see the parents' alarm clock showing 12:00. The timers for the lights would be affected, and the lights would not turn on at the same time that the burglars were expecting. However, Kate asks Peter on the plane if they set the timers on the lights. Peter says "I did." This indicates that they did in fact re-set the timers.

In the "Kevin's plan" montage, Kevin hoses the outside steps down to the basement. In the next shot he is painting tar on to the inside basement steps, working from the top down. It may seem he has effectively painted himself in to a corner and now has no way back out of the basement, but it's possible that either it took place before watering the stairs outside to the basement or the water probably hasn't frozen yet making it safe for Kevin to get out of the basement.

Towards the end of the movie, Kevin calls the police from his parents' bedroom. This should be impossible. The phones are out, which is why his parents can't reach him. That far into the film the phone lines had most likely already been fixed.

As Harry is driving down the driveway after a burglary he is wearing his black knit cap. Just after he hits the brakes to avoid hitting Kevin he pokes his head out to tell Kevin to be more careful and his cap is missing. However, he can clearly be seen removing his hat as he is winding the window down to talk to Kevin, which is why he is not wearing it in subsequent shots.

When the McCallisters are leaving in the morning and the neighbor boy is talking to the van driver, he is mouthing the driver's lines (the first time the driver speaks).

Addition: he does it the second time the drivers speaks as well.

After Marv is hit with an iron, a wrinkle can be seen in the mark on his face revealing that the iron print is actually a plastic sticker. It can also be seen later when Kevin puts the tarantula on Marv's nose.

Each time that Kevin leaves his home and returns, he only turns the knob to enter this home. Clearly, he never uses a key. When he knew that the burglars were coming back at 9pm, he leaves the church, arrives home and runs directly into the house showing it was already unlocked.

Obvious stunt double in the long shots of Kevin swinging across to the tree house.

While Jeff is zipping up his bag as Kevin tells him he never packed a suitcase, you can clearly see nothing but newspaper sticking out.

After checking too see if the cars are in the garage, when Kevin comes back into the house, the tree in the background is full of green leaves.

The McAllisters live in the richest part of town, and multiple families on this same block are all gone for Christmas. Yet, these families did not contribute to hiring a security service patrolling their streets, which is unthinkable.

Even though the alarm clocks are off because of the power outage, the odds are almost impossible that all 15 people in the house would oversleep until 8 AM.

All the commotion caused by Kevin's traps & Harry and Marv screaming should have alerted the neighbors as some would be staying for Christmas. The odds of people not hearing the chaos should be impossible.

While at the church, it never occurs to Mr. Marley to ask Kevin why he's alone at the church without his mother or father or anyone else in his family.

When Aunt Leslie says "Fuller! Go easy on the Pepsi", it is quite clearly a close-mic voiceover recorded off set (most likely in post-production), as the rest of the dialogue has a completely different natural reverb to this line.

Near the end of the film, as Kevin looks out of the window to see Mr. Marley reunited with his son, a hand holding a camera is clearly visible.

While Kevin is holding shears to cut the rope in the tree house, a few inches ahead of where he is to cut you can see something that looks like fishing line that is holding up the rope. This line is visible twice, as he appears with the cutters and again just as he is cutting the rope.

When Kevin walks into Buzz's room looking for his family after being left alone, on the bottom right of the frame you can see a crew member's leg.

When the police officer is chasing Kevin, the shadow of the camera is briefly visible on Kevin's back.

When the plane takes off from Chicago, it's morning. It takes about seven or eight hours to fly from Chicago to Paris, and Paris time is seven hours ahead of Chicago time. That would put them in Paris around one or two in the morning. Yet when the plane arrives in Paris, it's already broad daylight.

When the whole family arrives in Paris (which is really the underground walkway under the O'Hare Airport Hilton that connects the terminals at O'Hare, and looks like it may include parts of the old Terminal 4), Kate uses a public phone to call home. But this device can't be a French one because all phones available in France in the 90s required telephone cards.

When Kate phones the Chicago Police from France, she calls them on a payphone that is a BT model that wouldn't be found in France.

As the family bids farewell to Kate at the Paris airport, tail colors of an Eastern Airlines jet are visible outside the gate window. Eastern was a domestic U.S. airline and would not have serviced Paris.

When the family arrives at the gate for the plane, the door is already shut. Once an airlines shuts the gate door, they don't reopen it. Anyone arriving after the door is shut cannot board the plane.

Kevin wouldn't have enough time to completely refurbish the house after his battle with Marv and Harry.

It seems strange that Kevin would include the Christmas ornaments as part of his battle plan, as they would only hurt someone who no longer had shoes on and Kevin had no way of knowing Marv would enter the basement first, leave his shoes on the stairs, and only then enter through the window.

Kevin scares away the pizza delivery boy by tricking him into thinking that either Peter or Uncle Frank are shooting at him. Strangely, the pizza boy doesn't call the police on him for attempted murder.

On the plane when Kate feels like she's forgotten something, she asks Peter if he turned off the coffee maker and he says "I did," yet they had no electricity. Even if it was restored before they got into the vans, it seems doubtful that amid the chaos of trying to get to the airport someone would have made a pot of coffee, and no one is seen walking around with a coffee mug.

Peter calls the French police from Paris and is using a translation book, getting frustrated that the person on the other end of the line can't understand him. However, Peter's brother Rob, who lives in France and likely knows at least a little French, is in the next room and could help translate.

Kevin had many opportunities to get help from others like old man Marley and other people in a church, he even had access to a phone which seems to be working by the time the burglars start attempting to enter the house (by that point, Kevin had ordered a pizza for delivery). Yet all Kevin does to get help is call 911 to report a robbery at a neighbor's house.

Apart from Megan, Kevin's elder sister and to a lesser extent Kate, none of the family seem to be concerned about Kevin's welfare while abroad. However, in a deleted scene both of Kevin's sisters as well as Jeff and Peter are unable to sleep from being worried.

When everybody is home near the end, Kevin tells his mom and Dad he bought milk, eggs, and fabric softener when he went to the store. However, in the earlier scene at the store, there is neither eggs nor fabric softener among the items he bought.

While the eggs are never seen the box of fabric softener is visible at checkout.

When Kevin arrives home after speaking to Old Man Marley at the church, he runs right in the house without unlocking the front door - he left his house unlocked even though he knew that there were burglars in the area.