"Funny Games" is a remake, but it's not a remake in the traditional sense. It's the exact same movie with a different cast of characters filmed in a different location. Everything else is exactly as it was filmed in the original -- shot-for-shot, line-for-line. Haneke even went through the trouble of having the exact same blueprints for the vacation house where most of the film takes place. Because his original "Funny Games" (1997) was in German and subtitled, he believes it didn't reach American audiences.
Fair enough. If it truly is a hidden gem, such a remake doesn't seem like a bad idea. The problem is, it is.
The new American cast, including Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, do no better (or worse) than their counterparts in the Austrian version. It is not their fault that this film doesn't deliver.
With "Funny Games," Haneke wanted, as he says, to "show violence as it really is." Even in 1997, he was hardly the first filmmaker to approach this idea. The exploitation (a.k.a. "grindhouse") films of the 1970s had already received a powerful rebuke from cinema masters such as Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg with their works "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) and "Videodrome" (1983), respectively.
Haneke indulges himself by churning out a carbon copy of a mediocre film for American audiences. Cinema has been de-glamorizing violence for years now, especially in the 21st century, when we have seen such masterpieces as "The Proposition" (2005), and Chan-Wook Park's "revenge trilogy" (the most famous of which is "Oldboy" from 2003). Haneke is a little late to be provocative. This remake of Funny Games seems no more than an attempt to cash in.
The script is intriguing at times, but it ultimately comes off as too heavy handed. A middle-class American family falls into the hands of two prim, young sociopaths. The two young men come in under the guise of borrowing some eggs on the behalf of their neighbors, but then they don't leave. Instead they stick around to terrorize their victims with the intent of finally killing them after long hours of psychological and physical torture.
But this is not the torture of contemporary horror flicks. There's no intense gore: no hacking off limbs, no bizarre or complicated schemes. Instead there are moments of intense psychological pain that are horrifying and disturbing on a much different level.
It's a shame that Haneke decided to spoon-feed us his creative message. Paul (one of the sociopaths, played by Michael Pitt) makes the terrified family take a bet that they won't survive for more than 12 hours. Then he turns to the camera and announces that the audience is probably betting on the family. Okay, fine, we get it.
This browbeating is a flaw, but it's not a terribly crippling one. Yet Haneke has Paul do it again, just in case we weren't paying attention the first time. Later, the killer finds the remote control and rewinds the entire movie a few minutes backward. And if we still don't get it, his characters explicitly say that a "fictional reality" is as real as the "real reality." At this point, I was half expecting Haneke to pop up out of nowhere, point a finger at the camera and say, "It's all your fault! Violence isn't entertainment. Stop watching this, you evil, evil torture-pornography voyeurs!" I was disappointed that Haneke resisted that temptation and instead wrote something along those lines in the press notes for the film.
"Funny Games" is a mediocre version of a movie that was originally interesting, but ultimately severely flawed. If you're considering watching "Funny Games" for the first time, do yourself a favor and see "Ichi the Killer" (2001), "The Proposition" (2005) or "Oldboy" (2003) instead. These films have far more adeptly illustrated the repulsive nature of violence and torture. After all, the last thing we want to do is encourage other unremarkable foreign filmmakers like Haneke to remake their older works to "reach American audiences."
