Funny Games movie review & film summary (2008) | Roger Ebert

Every once in a while, Paul addresses the camera with a conspiratorial smile or a nudge-nudge, wink-wink joke. He guesses that “you [the audience] are probably on their [the victims’] side.” He and Peter represent the film’s side. What do you want to bet they will win the already-decided bet?

As an academic exercise in learned helplessness, the film flaunts the ultimate power to rewrite its own “rules” whenever it likes, including taking back anything that has already been shown. A movie with no restrictions holds no real suspense, and no surprises, so any revelation of plot details in, say, a review, is meaningless.

What makes “Funny Games” different than any other campy-scary horror movie that gets off on tormenting its characters and teasing its audience? Not much. It’s being pitched to the “Hostel” crowd (who are invited to laugh) and the art-house crowd (who are invited to feel ennobled as they shake their heads and lament the state of violence in movies).

Haneke (whose masterworks include “Code Unknown” and “Cache”) explains that his distinctively European film is “a reaction to … the way American cinema toys with human beings … [so that] violence is made consumable.” That’s true, and it’s what “Funny Games” sets out to do, but Haneke’s essay fails because he hasn’t a clue about what makes American movies tick. “Funny Games” doesn’t seduce you with conventional storytelling and character development and then turn them around on you — like, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Psycho.” Instead, as the press kit explains, it encourages its viewers “to see their own role through a series of emotional and analytical episodes.” In other words, this isn’t a movie, it’s a thesis.

“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.

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