“Funny Games”: The feel-bad movie of the year

One could call Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" the "feel-bad movie of the year" and not be incorrect – to be sure, Haneke's shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 German-language thriller, about a family terrorized in their vacation home by a pair of ever-so-polite killers, is a powerful downer. If you ever wondered how it would feel if two psychotic preppie turds marched into your home and calmly brutalized everything you hold dear, well, it doesn't get more gut-twistingly intimate than this.

Still, this is Haneke we're talking about – auteur, social critic, director of such avant-garde mind-blowers as "The Piano Teacher" and "Cache" – so "Funny Games" must offer something besides "Hostel"-style torture-porn, right?

Commentary? Irony? An upturned European nose? It does, but with a day-old staleness that defeats the very purpose. It's yesterday's metafiction. Meet the victims – dad George (Tim Roth), mom Ann (Naomi Watts, lachrymose and gorgeous, as always) and 11-year-old son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) – a family so bourgeois-perfect that they willingly listen to classical music while tooling up to their place on the shore. Alas, the family is destined for doom – a fact Haneke impishly announces by drowning their Vivaldi in waves of crashing thrash-metal.

Sure enough, George barely has their schooner in the water when Ann is visited in the kitchen by Paul (Michael Pitt from "Murder by Numbers") and Peter (Brady Corbet from "thirteen"), a pair of effete-looking young men in white gloves and polo shirts. They come looking for eggs to borrow, but it's a game, of course – a prelude to a nightmarish home invasion in which the lads scold the family for their rudeness while meting out the most sadistic sort of abuse.

"Behave yourself!" Paul tells a squirming Georgie after Peter crushes his father's kneecap with a titanium driver. That kind of thing. The ordeal that follows is harrowing and sickening, but not always tense or thrilling. (At one point, as a sort of post-carnage palate cleanser, George and Ann spend five numbing minutes trying to get a cell phone to work.)

Then again, this is no thriller in the conventional sense. Haneke reminds us of that fact by having Pitt intermittently kick holes in the imaginary "fourth wall" between audience and filmmaker – like Ferris Bueller, only nihilistic. The implication: This guy is so in control, such an invincible embodiment of media rot, that he can defy the laws of cinema.

Or whatever. The thing that makes "Funny Games" feel slightly irrelevant isn't Pitt's camera kissy-poo, but the sadism itself. This might come as news to Haneke, but in the 10 years since the original "Funny Games" – and all the myriad gore-porn "Saw" sequels in between – we've managed to expose our violence addiction all by ourselves, thank you very much. And that's the book on "Funny Games": Ten years late, several dozen eviscerations short.

'Funny Games'
Stars: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet
Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Michael Haneke
Rated: R (terror, violence and some language)
Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
Grade: C