Funny Games: Critic Reviews

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time?

Funny Games, Michael Haneke's first English-language film -- and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title -- subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality.

While Haneke is attacking our culture for being drawn to violent fare, he is also relishing in presenting it to us, in prolonged and detailed fashion.

While the movie's star -- and ruler, and ship's captain, and grand poobah -- is Haneke himself, his actors are sublime.

Director Michael Haneke abhors mindless cinematic violence as much as you do. He just has a different approach: high-minded shock therapy.

Without ever acknowledging his own sadism, Haneke self-righteously lays his aesthetic and moral cards on the table.

If you're interested in intellectual abstraction, you might find Haneke's games intriguing. Just be warned: When the movie ends, you'll definitely feel like you've been played.

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense. Who thought the world needed a shot-for-shot English-language version of Mr. Haneke's 1997 German-language film?

The worst of the violence occurs off-screen, but Funny Games is still a vicious, vicious movie.

All the things we hope from in a fright film with characters we recognize as very much like ourselves are toyed with.

Haneke's assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged -- a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

I would absolutely defend Haneke's right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he's not keeping up with the times; he's behind them.

This isn't a movie, it's a thesis.

Both versions of Funny Games force the audience to eat it, really eat it, and while they're eating it, to think about the mechanics and the narrative tropes of a typical revenge drama.

The earlier release helped make him a critics' darling with its meta-movie touches and baldly articulated strategy of implicating the audience in the violence; replayed a decade later, those stunts feel both rhetorical and redundant.

[Director Haneke is] an adept manipulator who goes one better by calling attention to his manipulations, questioning them, and then, still, managing to freak us out in the coldest, cruelest ways.

Even if you're already aware that violence is sickening, thank you very much, Haneke's confrontational film stirs up distressing emotions and leaves you to resolve them as best you can. Good luck. You'll need it.

It's one big ball of icky attitude, violence and nihilism.

It's not a fun ride, but Funny Games forces us -- almost against our will -- to examine its characterization of violence and our response to it.

You know what garbage is, but until you see Funny Games, a bucket of swill by Austrian wacko Michael Haneke, you have no idea how bad it can smell.

As the film progresses, it becomes painfully clear there's no real point to the story; what we're witnessing is a cool, intellectual exercise, as devoid of character and motivation as the two psychos themselves.

Basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as Hostel, even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

It's a pity the movie is so smug, gimmicky and heartless.

The performances are outstanding across the board. The direction and writing are masterful.

You will be deeply disturbed, but you will watch obsessively. You will be haunted, and manipulated, and angered, and you will suffer pangs of guilt, too.