'Funny Games' movie review

By Kevin Karner

“We’re going to make a bet now. You bet that you’ll be alive tomorrow at nine a.m., and we bet that you’ll be dead.”

Funny Games could be summarized accurately with that sentence, but to do so would be to cast supreme injustice upon director Michael Heneke, his vision, and his remade film, which I believe to be the scariest film I’ve seen all year.

I use the word “scary” loosely, since most modern American movies that are intended to scare anyone over the age of twelve tend to be the entertainment and intellectual equivalent to lighting a bag of dog poop on fire, putting on your neighbor’s doorstep, ringing the doorbell and booking it, only to find that no one home.

In the end, you have wasted your time and money, only to have sizzling dog poop and a bit of adrenaline to show for it.

In all fairness, I can excuse a few recent releases as having their horrific moments. These movies like the first Saw trilogy, Hostel, and Wolf Creek, fall under the “realist horror” genre, usually using gratuitous and realistic violence or gore for its appeal. This is the type of film that

Funny Games both tries to emulate and criticize, which is basically why it’s hard to classify it under a genre.

It incorporates bits of dark comedy and drama within the horror, among other things, but could also very well fall under the “art house” sub-genre for snapping in and out of the fourth dimension periodically.

In 1997, German filmmaker Michael Heneke unveiled his much-awaited movie Funny Games to positive reviews and eventual monetary success. Ten years later, Heneke has remade the same film, word for word, in English, produced by actress Naomi Watts. This makes watching this film pointless if you’ve seen the original, or unnecessary to watch the original if you’re planning on seeing the 2008 version.

The plotline follows George (Tim Roth) and Anne (Naomi Watts) who have a cute little boy named Georgie (Devon Gearheart). They own a cabin (which they are visiting), a sailing boat, and a dog. Without a landline phone, they are left alone with a beautiful lake front property, privacy and two sociopaths who stop in to borrow a few eggs.

The pair, Paul (Michael Pitts) and Peter (Brady Corbet), clad in matching white golfer’s clothes and impeccable manners, gradually begin to antagonize the unsuspecting family, disposing of all cell phones and refusing to leave. The young men seem harmless, but when Paul decides then to break George’s kneecap, their sinister intentions are revealed. Armed with a shotgun, knife and golf club, the family is held hostage through the night, victims of the pair’s relentless physical and psychological torture.

The purpose of remaking the film in English, as opposed to just subtitling it, was to try to popularize the movie and perhaps get it the cult following it had in Europe. So far, the movie has come across mixed reviews and low box office numbers, but I would argue that the fault lies not in the content, but the general audience.

This film gets in your head by giving the pretense that you will witness all the horrible acts, and then turns around on you by not showing anything! Everything is off-screen, so you are left with only the gruesome sound effects. The horror sets in as your imagination sets to work on the images off screen, leaving you in more suspense than what was presented in the Hostel or Saw movies.

Unlike the hypocritical Untraceable or The Condemned, this film does exactly what it intends to do, give a stark, unrelenting look at America’s infatuation with violence and torture. Heneke said he wrote the original story with an American family in mind.

The villains, primarily Peter, even go as far as talking directly to the audience in an almost interactive experience, acknowledging itself as a movie and mocking you, the audience for wanting to see that violence and gore, while simultaneously being appalled by those gruesome acts on innocent people.

While the premise is all well and good, the real exceptional aspect of the movie comes from the believability of the actors, as the acting and casting is nothing short of spectacular. Naomi Watts plays the mother sympathetically, Tim Roth was fitting in the fatherly role, and little Devon Gearhart was just pitch-perfect as the terrorized ten-year-old Georgie.

Michael Pitt, who has amazed ever since 2001’s underrated Bully, is by far the best actor in the movie, shining in every single scene and being 100 percent believable as a rich, snobby, bored-out-of-his-mind young man, bringing out that delinquent charisma of Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange.

Brady Corbet, who was all kinds of fantastic in 2004’s Mysterious Skin, is great as the quietly maniacal counterbalance to Pitt’s extroverted character. The absurd contrast between their banter and their actions actually provide sort of an unsettling undercurrent of humor throughout the movie.

All in all, I think this is a great movie, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. The entertainment value doesn’t really come from an entertaining storyline, but rather the feeling you get after walking out of the theater, never having any sort of tension relief for the past 141 minutes (that part’s rewound on camera by the villains).

Funny Games will disappoint the Saw and Hostel audience and may confuse newcomers who have been tricked by the misleading previews. With that aside, I greatly enjoyed the dissection of violence, and someone who understands the point of the film and is open minded to the style employed in it will too.