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Funny Games
Warner
Independent Pictures, 107mins, R
Written and Directed
by Michael Haneke
In general, films which attack their audiences fail, and this is the
case with this one. About ten years ago, Michael Haneke did a German
version of this film and it went down the memory hole and pretty
much vanished. Haneke's career thrived over the following decade,
with such films as “Cashe” and when he finally came over to this
side of the Atlantic, he noticed that a genre called “torture porn”,
horror films like “Hostel” and “Saw” were popular, and decided to do
a remake of that long-ago film as an attack on the fans of the
genre.
Now I was never a fan of
torture porn, but at least those who have made them have tried to
make interesting movies, this is not.
This film is about two little boys and their toys. The toys in this
case are Ann(Naomi Watts), George(Tim Roth) and their son
Georgie(Devon Gearhart) a slightly rich family out on the east end
for a weekend vacation at the summer place. Apparently, they have a
golf date with neighbors Fred(Boyd Gaines) and Betsy(Siobhan Fallon
Hogan), who are playing “host” to two well dressed, polite monsters:
Peter(Brady Corbet) and Paul(Michael Pitt), who are the little boys
in question. This isn't real, after all, this is only a movie.
We're supposed to know
this, right. But the magic of cinema is to make one suspend
disbelief, and Haneke does his best to make sure that the audience
has a tough time doing that. Paul talks to the audience and there's
a scene where he uses his magic remote to…NONONONONONONONON NO!!!!!
This is a slap in the face to the audience and dammit, it ruins the
film.
In a film, it's the director's job to make one feel for the
characters, and Haneke manages to do this with the victims. The
acting is terrific. Everyone from the monsters to the kid gives a
splendid performance, and to what? It stops being entertaining soon
after the film gets it's mojo on, and the last third is a complete
waste of time. Don't bother.
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