Highly Overrated But Still Good

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

A double-bill of Michael Haneke's notoriously provocative home-invasion thriller FUNNY GAMES, its original version and the US shot-by-shot remake made a decade later with a different cast, they are basically the same film, the only noticeable revision is a landline telephone would be plausibly upgraded to a cellphone. Affixing death metal to high-brow classical music, FUNNY GAMES alerts us from the beginning of its irreconcilably conflicting parties in this game of torture and murder: the bourgeois nuclear family (emblazoned by their lakeside holiday residence and a private boat) versus two white-gloves-sporting, acedia-afflicted young psychopaths (whose backgrounds are completely in the shadows). It is very interesting to watch how genteel etiquette disintegrates into hostility on a moment's notice, and how it becomes a fortune to hostage if one is that prone to irritability yet not cautious enough to the consequences, although what is blatantly shocking is the want of clear motive behind these two amoral young men, who wallow in inflicting sadism and cruelty to innocent people, and are dangerously masked by a normal and friendly appearance. But after watching the same story twice (not recommended though), a viewer may sense something perniciously self-serving in the scene nearly the beginning, the couple can be cautioned by their friend (aka. the previous hostage), a warning out of desperation might not be a game-changer to overcome the perpetrators (who are in possession of a rifle), but at least, they can try to fight back and very likely break the vicious circleAlso one can second-guess that in lieu of complete resignation, the wife could have shown some bravura by jumping onto their neighbor's departing boat in the eleventh hour only if she knew it would be her last chance. To mitigate the ill-feeling stemmed from audience's emotional investment of the beleaguered family, Haneke opts for a novel schtick by allowing one of the young wrongdoer Paul (Frisch/Pitt) to occasionally break the 4th wall and even play God with a remote control when an unpremeditated accident croaking his companion, archly takes audience away from their heinous act and nattering hogwash, renders a refreshing sensation of levity, which is a crying reprieve at that point of the narrative (after sending both a dog and a child to meet their makers out of Haneke's convention-defying obduracy). The film is violent no doubt, but mercifully we are spared from witnessing direct simulation of killing save its grisly aftermath, and it is fire and brimstone for the two leads, in the earlier version, the late Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe (who became a couple in real life after making this film) stupendously put themselves through the wringer of distress, terror and despair, command onerous brawn against physical hindrance (including in a challenging long take lasting more than ten minutes), and Lothar notably drains all her energy into a traumatized state that's too disturbing to look twice. The same impression is ineluctably blunted in the remake, due to the vanishing thrill of reiteration, nevertheless Naomi Watts, undergoes the same ordeal with equally gutsy virtuosity but less apparel.On the villain parts, a wide-eyed Michael Pitt totally and literally pales in comparison with Arno Frisch, whose bumptious self-assurance is simultaneously gnawing and sinister, whereas Frank Giering and Brady Corbet both make a good accomplice who is unpleasantly effete and morbidly creepy. Teasing with the line between reality and fiction, the sick underside of human frailties often overlooked by the prim and the proper, Haneke's succès-de-scandale is not for faint-hearted but an anglophone remake made in facsimile betrays his eagerness to unleash the bane on those subtitle-eschewing English-speaking Americans, a bespoke commodity speaks volumes of his faintly veiled intention.

A family is having a few days off at their cabin near the lake. Two mentally disturbed youngsters invade in their house in order to torture and kill them. Unique... The director is using some tricks in order to make the film less boring. For example the killer is looking at the camera and talks to the audience. Charming... Then, totally unnecessarily, he deliberately delays some scenes. Or maybe not so unnecessarily. The film would be too short without all those tormenting (but only for the viewer) minutes where we have to watch every single moment of the victims crawling or the view of the house at the night for 15 seconds with no reason. And...that's all folks...I mean it...THAT was all... Honestly no difference to any other splatter-horror film ever created except maybe from the hopeless and apparently unsuccessful endeavor of its director to make a difference...

Michael Haneke (MH) is a not so mainstream director (such as Martin Scorsese for example), but he definitely should be. This review will be based 60% in "Funny Games" (FG) and 40% in MH as a director. I find myself very fond of him due to one simple fact: he's a modern-day Stanley Kubrick (SK), which I regard as the best film director/auteur of all time. Dedicated to analyze and explore the dark sides of humanity, he achieves in this film a "funny" portrayal of his point of view about Violence.FG is not for the faint of heart. MH has a distaste of how Hollywood portrays violence in movies, which is an explicit and morbid exploitation, which sometimes reaches unhealthy levels. Talking about violence in the film: the film is violent, but you never get to see violent or bloody images. MH loves to take the attention away from those detailed moments to create expectations and make the audience's imagination start playing "games". The uncertainty of this moments makes the heavy atmosphere of the flick. The greatest example is: when Paul is making himself a sandwich and you hear the gunshot and consequent screams; you feel desperate for knowing what happened. If the movie was made by a USA filmmaker, it is very probably that you could see what happened, in detail.The film walks between fiction and reality. Paul makes various fourth-wall breaks throughout the movie, and he even rewinds the scene where Anna shoots Peter (not allowing that to happen). Peter, on the other hand, refers and critic many aspects of the traditional suspense rules established by USA films. We are accustomed to seeing the protagonist win and live to tell the tale, well, not here. Paul and Peter even have an interesting discussion about fiction and reality at the end of the film, which makes you think about it afterward.Our main villains: charming well-educated sociopaths that will do whatever they please with whoever they want. Taking Paul as the leader, a little perfect Hannibal Lecter (leaving aside Cannibalism and Psychopathy). In the end, they did everything for just one simple aspect: because they could, and no one has ever told them they couldn't do something.Attention is what MH plays within his movies. He demands complete attention from you to understand. Whether it is with Long Shots or never giving explicit detail of what's going on, MH proves to be a skillful manipulator of the audience to achieve this: you leaving the theater wanting more. We are used to finishing a movie totally satisfied with what we saw and how everything ended (happily ever after). Well, not with MH. He wants you to go browsing and find whatever you can about what you just saw. Most than nothing, he wants you to make your OWN conclusions about the story: "Caché" (2005) and "The White Ribbon" (2009) for naming two. MH has between 10 to 15 movies to his name, all of them considered good movies, showing different aspects of humanity (often the dark ones), with a perfect sense of direction and meticulous execution. Tell me if this doesn't remind you of SK: Quality before Quantity. It is also important to state the difference between horror and terror. Horror is for fictional and irrational fears (ghosts and supernatural situations), and terror is for real things (a murderer or an accident). This movie is which? Kind of both isn't it?. On one side, you have a home invasion and in the other an antagonist that can manipulate time and space for achieving success. MH said that the movie was a message about violence in media. He said FG was intended to be neither horror nor terror.Something funny is that MH hates Quentin Tarantino (QT), mostly because he mixes violence and comedy, and his violence is extremely satirical. MH has a violent and bold style for most of his movies. He believes that violence portrayed in movies should have a serious and deep approach, special reason why he despises QT's movies. MH's filming style, psychological approach, and audience manipulation are his greatest weapons. He doesn't fear to make a movie of any theme or genre, and whenever he does, the final product is an instant masterpiece. He made a shot-for-shot remake of FG in 2007 with an entire USA crew. The film received mixed reviews. Why? Because it wasn't the kind of violence and suspense USA audiences like. MH wanted to prove a point, and he succeeded. MY FINAL CONSENSUS: Funny Games is out of the question a different kind of suspense and thriller, but a pretty interesting and effective one. Michael Haneke plays with audiences, in order to bring an excellent law-breaker critic of violence portrayal.

Michael Haneke is one of the last few living propagators of cinematic modernism that we have left (RIP Abbas Kiarostami). Many know his 2005 masterpiece, Caché, or Hidden, but misread it and furiously focused on the answer to the puzzle of the video-tapes while brushing past the slow compression of historical and classist guilt and distress around Georges. Others know The White Ribbon, his modernist response to Hollywood Holocaust films such as Schindler's List, dubbed 'a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson'. But of all these films the most brash and unsubtle of them is clearly Funny Games. It forgoes the building of suspense or mystery; it doesn't lay down breadcrumbs for the audience to pick up or confront them with possibilities to unlocking new answers. It is Haneke at his most uninhibited. This is simultaneously the film's triumph and downfall. Haneke employs a certain grit and cold realism that reinforces the brutality and sadism of the film's violence. There is no non-deigetic sound, only silence to accentuate the harsh screams and cries of pain that ring around the halls, and he utilises long-takes of such agonising length and desperation that we become transported into the scene itself, hurriedly glancing behind our shoulders as if Peter and Paul might return at any moment, golf club in hand. The most telling sign of Haneke's success in this department is the backlash towards the film. It cannot be more obvious in the reactions of those who call the film's action a depraved and sadistic affair, or mindless garbage, that they have been long coaxed by what Haneke is trying to disarm himself: the flashy, aestheticised violence and carefully cultivated endings of today's blockbusters. The modernist form also lends itself an aesthetic self-consciousness and reflexivity, and an acute awareness of its own origins and contextual influences of the past. Haneke cleverly weaves this aspect into his own battle; through Paul's breakings of the fourth wall, goading and questioning their audience and ensuring their complicity with what is being portrayed on the screen. A bet is made to signify the commodification of all that is great in violence. This is not, of course, a mutual agreement - Haneke posits that our desensitisation towards violence is so great that none of us should have any problem with what we are watching, and so from this he builds and builds. It's a grumpy old man within that can't quite resist or hold back in his agenda, and won't actually stop until every member of the audience has left. But the film is positioned so that with either reaction, he comes away victorious. Avert your eyes, walk out of the theatre (not that many went in the first place), or switch the television off, and his entire argument is justified, in that modern depictions of screen violence are little more than artefacts to stimulate, arouse and then placate our desires. One senses that Haneke looks upon this reaction with a little smugness. And yet stay and revel (if you can) for the entire runtime of Funny Games, and Haneke is allowed to brand you with disgust and the sadomasochistic label. Clearly, if you enjoy and sit and watch the whole thing, you're beyond the mere problem of the media's saturation of graphic violence and need a lot more intervention. So Haneke sets himself up to have his cake and eat it too, and the most intriguing moment in the film reinforces this notion of omniscient control that he asserts. George Junior somehow manages to acquire a shotgun and wield it competently, and sends Peter flying with a cartoonishly exaggerated shot straight into the wall. Haneke dangles the bait, that promise of vengeance and retribution, and then without any precedent, magically rewinds and erases the moment. This is a power move, the cinematic equivalent of Haneke flipping the bird to any viewer left that was foolish enough to hope and dream for that conventional third act resolution. Ultimately Funny Games is basically comprised of these moments - it doesn't enable the seductive powers of storytelling and characterisation and then turn them onto their backs, like Ribbon and Caché were structured. It's an endurance test of your moralities, and at the end of it no one is declared the winner. Except for Haneke himself, who must be positively delighted at all the outrage and controversy. Haneke's own 2007 American remake of the same film is a whole other conundrum. It is, in a nutshell, ideologically bankrupt. Here is a director who has denounced the mainstream, and would be sorely ashamed to sell out at the box office or win an Oscar, but then throws fifteen million into what is basically a meaningless experiment. Not only it is pathetic to watch Haneke wrest with what he should be opposed to, the soulless aimless American remake, but in the process of it the film's agenda is considerably diminished. Everything is cleaner - the actors are prettier, the sets are spotless, the murderers are more charismatic. They stalk through the sleek white decor of the lake house with a devilish grin, and by aestheticising them Haneke has succumbed to his own accusations. And in casting Hollywood stars in leading roles in Roth and Watts, he has commercialised what he vehemently argued beforehand should not be commercialised.Funny Games (1997) - 7/10Funny Games (2007) - 3/10