First things first, let me confess to something: I haven’t seen Funny Games. Or rather, I haven’t seen the original 1997 Funny Games - only the 2007 remake. In this essay, though, I won;t just be passing judgement on the 2007 English-language version, but on the original as well, and here’s why.
Michael Haneke was very clear on his reasons for remaking his film: he wanted it to reach a wider audience, so that he could more effectively spread the message contained therein. Funny Games (2007) was intended as a shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games (1997). It was directed by the same director, just ten years after the original released, and Haneke’s stated intention was to replicate the film exactly, but with a more famous cast and English dialogue, so that the film would be more palatable to Western audiences. Therefore, barring some differences in the look of the remake (the decade between the two films saw the advent of digital), and slight changes in the performances caused by the change in the cast, Funny Games (2007) should be considered more like a translation than a remake. If it fails to capture the spirit of the original, making my judgement invalid, that is the fault of Michael Haneke - he has failed in his attempt to translate the film. So when I refer to Funny Games, I will be referring to the English-language remake, but I doubt I would have a different opinion of the Austrian version.
For those that haven’t seen it, Funny Games is about a family of three (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and someone else) who are visited at their home by two young men, who ask to borrow an egg. The men then overpower Roth and Watts and torture them through the night, eventually murdering all three. There’s a lot that works about the film. The dialogue is sharply written, the performances are all excellent, and the tension that Haneke generates never lets up, making Funny Games one of the hardest to watch films I have seen. Moreover, the torture that the two men inflict on Watts and family is primarily psychological. They force Tim Roth to ask his wife to undress for them; they taunt the two about their impending deaths; they murder the family’s dog, and guide Watts through a sadistic game of looking for the body. The only memorable act of violence in the film, besides the murders, is when one of the intruders breaks Tim Roth’s leg at the beginning of the home invasion, and even that is more a matter of practicality. One gets the sense that they broke Roth’s leg not as part of the torture, but as a prerequisite for it - in order for their plans to work, Roth has to be incapacitated.
Where a lesser filmmaker might use the set-up as an excuse to indulge in graphic violence, Haneke knows that the real horror happens in the mind of the audience, and that the quickest route to that mind is through dialogue. The audience aren’t really having their legs broken, but they are really listening to Peter and Paul (the two home invaders) talk.
The cinematography is also very good (Haneke knows how to use a camera), and any film that has Naked City on the soundtrack earns points from me. Still, though, this isn’t a review - this is about what’s wrong with Funny Games. At the risk of looking like a philistine, here we go.
The things that work about Funny Games are exactly the elements that are most conventional. If this were just a horror film about a home invasion, it would be very well put together (although I still might not like it, for reasons I’ll go into later). Haneke, though, doesn’t make conventional films, and it seems he’s incapable of getting behind a camera without expounding his paranoia about the nature of video recording. In Caché and Benny’s Video, he did so in an interesting and rewarding way, but when making Funny Games Haneke was for some reason possessed by the spirit of a second-year film student, and decided to get really fucking meta.
Fourth wall breaks are a tricky thing. Do them right, and they can be great; do them wrong, and you look inept and pretentious. Haneke does not do them right. You see, the whole point of Funny Games is to question the audience - why are you still watching? Why do you like seeing people being tortured? Do we live in a society? So when Peter/Paul makes the family bet on whether they will survive the night (he, of course, bets that they won’t), he then turns to the camera and says, directly to the audience, “What about you? Who do you bet on?” or something of the sort. Get it? We’re watching the film, so we’re complicit in what the characters are doing. Later in the film, Naomi Watts manages to get hold of the shotgun Peter/Paul has been threatening the family with, and shoots Peter/Paul. Paul/Peter is shocked, and grabs a TV remote. He presses the rewind button and turns back time to just before Watts grabs the shotgun - he stops her, and saves Peter/Paul. Get it? It’s a film, so he can rewind it like a film. Get it? Do you get it yet? You’re rooting for the family, but you don't really want them to win yet, because you’re enjoying watching them suffer. Do you get it? Micahel Haneke isn’t sure you’ve really got it.
What’s really irritating about Funny Games is that Haneke clearly thinks he’s asking tough questions about our relationship to violent media, but he isn’t. He’s pointing out that we like to watch violent media - that’s it. He describes something that everyone already knows, and then acts as though he’s uncovered some deep truth. Without the pretension, Funny Games would be a pointless exercise in the depiction of cruelty. With it, it’s an hour and a half of listening to Michael Haneke’s opinions on cinematic violence - a fate only marginally better than that visited upon the characters in the film. 
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