Funny Games (2007)

Funny Games (R) - Review

"Douche Ex Machina"

An afluent family and their rural vacation home are besieged by two seethingly polite youths seeking entertainment through fear and torture.  A statement about the nature of violence and media gets drowned out by the crashing of its own fourth wall.  This film is the director's remake of his earlier 1997 foriegn language version, and probably something has been lost in translation to America.

Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction) and Naomi Watts (Mullholland Drive) play the parents trying to save their lives and their sons.  The two semi-immortal teen antagonists are relative unknowns who always mind their p's and q's as they terrorize their victims.  They are dressed in almost all-white tennis outfits (presumably before labor day), a pair of Kennebunkport killers who don't follow the rules of normal slasher movie villians.  In fact what they enjoy most is breaking those cinematic rules even as they demand the ones they make up be stringently followed.

Very Eurocentric in tone and philosophy, the winks at the camera come across as crass "I Told You Sos".  The mostly off-screen violence is tepid while the tension and anxiety is scalding, a convolution that works to drive the point home (while not sh*tting where it eats).  Naomi and the boys turn in terrific dread inducing performances, while Roth merely limps along.  The script is littered with red herrings, intelligently playing with the cliches and expectations of the modern thriller.  A furiously unfunny film packed with smirking tension, Funny Games mostly exists to cheat its audience out of what it wants most; to still be entertained by violence even as it tries to forget events like the Columbine Massacre ever happened.

5 Borrowed Eggs out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)