GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/11/08)

Funny Games is a practically shot-by-shot English-language remake of the 1997 German-language film by the Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke. The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock.

Haneke is a very accomplished filmmaker and, more importantly in this case, an extremely intelligent man. He is not quite so intelligent, though, that he's able to recognize a really bad idea when one occurs to him. Funny Games purports to condemn mass media and cinematic violence by positing two extremely polite young psychos — products of our media culture, supposedly —against a decent bourgeois family of three, vacationing at their isolated lake house. The two white-clad preppies (Corbet and Pitt) take the trio (Roth, Watts, and little Gearhart, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Nikolai Burlyayev of Tarkovsky's 1962 Ivan's Childhood) hostage, subjecting them to a series of increasingly sadistic games, meant to culminate in the family's extermination. Every now and then Pitt's character, the smarter of the two psychos, turns to the camera and addresses the audience: "You're on their side, aren't you?" he asks early on; later, he says, "You want a real ending, with plausible plot development."

Well, that would have been nice, actually. Haneke was particularly eager to remake the picture in English, in an American setting, because the film, you see, is about America. Never mind that the conceit of a married couple playing "guess the classical music piece" with their car's CD player (in the opening scene) strikes one as slightly, you know, European.