United States, France, United Kingdom · 2008
Rated R · 1h 51m
Director Michael Haneke
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet
Genre Drama, Horror, Thriller
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When Ann, husband George and son Georgie arrive at their holiday home they are visited by a pair of polite and seemingly pleasant young men. Armed with deceptively sweet smiles and some golf clubs, they proceed to terrorize and torture the tight-knit clan, giving them until the next day to survive.
Funny Games represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to.
A stylish, darkly satirical horror-thriller, raising serious questions about Hollywood’s sanitisation of violence.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
A patronizing, self-satisfied piece of work, Funny Games is Michael Haneke's way of chastising us for blindly following the traditional rules of entertainment.
It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
The experience of watching Funny Games, be it the original or this version, is never forgotten, whatever your ultimate impression of the film.
By and large, reviewers have conceded that the picture is exceptionally gripping and suspenseful while deriding its moral subtext as a crock. The only explanation possible for such fuming pettiness, in my opinion, is the fact that Michael Haneke isn’t one of us.
If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.
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