THE joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for “Funny Games,” which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as “Hostel,” even if it’s tricked out with intellectual pretension.
This is an English-language remake of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film of the same title, which he said he made as a rejoinder to the violent American films of the post-Tarantino era.
That version was barely released in America, prompting Haneke himself to direct this remake aimed at a theoretically larger audience. It has a different cast and transposes the action to Long Island but is otherwise virtually the same movie, shot-for-shot.
The one major change is telling. While Anna, the main female character being gagged and tortured in the original kept on her clothes, Haneke ups the ante this time around by adding the humiliation of stripping her down to bra and panties for a substantial period of screen time.
Perhaps it was the idea of the new Anna, Naomi Watts, who is listed as an executive producer of the remake and who wastes something of a tour de force in service of what finally amounts to self-abuse by the director – and just plain abuse for the audience.
Not that Haneke doesn’t generate considerable suspense, at least at the outset, as a young man who calls himself Peter (Brady Corbet) shows up at the door of Anna’s secluded upscale weekend home and asks to borrow eggs for a neighbor at whose home he is supposedly staying.
The eggs end up on the floor and Anna’s cellphone in the sink as the young man tries to politely provoke Anna. When her ineffectual husband George (Tim Roth in a role more effectively played by the late Ulrich Muhle in the original) tries to intervene, he ends up being brutally attacked (off-screen) with a golf club.
In short order, Anna, the newly crippled George and their young son George (Devon Gearhart) are captives of Paul and his friend Peter (a more menacing Michael Pitt), who politely announce they’re going to play games, betting on whether their three hosts will still be alive the next morning.
As he did in the original, Haneke mocks audience expectations for captive family movies, refusing to give the preppy thugs even a motive. He has Peter break the fourth wall by addressing us directly. “You really think that’s enough?” he taunts at one point. “You do want a proper ending, don’t you?”
Haneke – who has directed far better movies, like “Cache,” since the original “Funny Games” – even has Peter use a TV remote to rewind an especially grisly scene so he can change the outcome. Audiences who haven’t fled by this point may be wishing he erased the whole movie.
FUNNY GAMES
Strictly for masochists. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity). At the Empire, the Chelsea, the Angelika, others.