Funny Games (R-2007)

"Funny Games" looked like a very interesting, promising premise, with a similar look and feel to "A Clockwork Orange". You have two incredibly polite young men dressed in upper-crust tennis clothing who are actually psychotic and revel in the mental and physical torture of others. They use their politeness and charm to gain a foothold into the home of a family who has just arrived in their summer home. You start to see them toying with the family in odd ways before turning it up many notches, escalating to psychological and physical torture "games". They eventually spell out their objective: They explain to the family that they want to make a bet: They bet that the family will be dead within 12 hours and they assume the family will take the opposite bet. At this point, the protagonist, Paul (Michael Pitt) turns to the camera and asks the audience who they will be betting on, breaking the fourth wall. This is where the wheels really start to come off the wagon. What follows is a night of agony for the family, but somehow this moves along very slowly and could have been saved with some tighter editing. There is one sequence where the mother (Naomi Watts) is struggling around the room, bound, ever so slowly while the camera remains in one stationery position. As it turns out, this whole exercise is meant to be a commentary on film audience's thirst for blood, a la "Saw" and "Hostel" films. The problem is you really never get that point. If you are trying to make a point and no one gets it, you have failed to make that point. The aforementioned "A Clockwork Orange" made similar points about violence much more effectively. The movie is very white (alll of the walls, the fence, much of the clothes, including the white gloves worn by the psychos) and incredibly quiet. There is no soundtrack at all, other than music the characters listen to in certain sequences. This is probably supposed to add to the effect that you are a voyeur in this night of "funny games" and not a movie watcher. It succeeds on that level, but only on that level. During one scene, Paul is very angry at something the mother has done and actually uses the family's remote control to "rewind" the movie to change the outcome. At this point, it crosses over into silliness. It seems the director was trying too hard to make an arty, intellectual piece, but it didn't work for me at all. I've read that others "got it" and loved it, but I wasn't one of them. The cast was all very good, but that was not enough to save the movie for me.

Grade: D-

Trailer: