Funny Games

A married couple (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) and their son (Devon Gearhart) are terrorized in their vacation home by two soft-spoken punks (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet). Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke, remaking his 1997 German-language film, appears to be aiming for an indictment of the kind of audience bloodthirst that has led to the lamentable vogue for torture-porn movies; Haneke shows Pitt turning to the camera to ask the audience’s advice and rewinding the action with a remote control to play things out again in a different way. But Haneke doth protest too much; his movie looks and feels like nothing more than a torture-porn movie made by a stodgy, pedantic German professor: static, slow-moving, and perversely timid, without even the prurient, debased and sadistic charge of Saw or Hostel.