ACED Magazine

Rated: R

As a family settles into its vacation home, they find they have unexpected visitors -- a pair of young, articulate, white-gloved serial killers on an excursion through the neighborhood.

DVD Features:

• Widescreen and Fullscreen Formats

Critique:

There are varying extreme opinions centered around this filmic release. People either love it or hate it. Oddly enough, I neither loved it or hated it. Funny Games is definitely a character-driven piece, but I felt the story should have been slightly more developed.

I think the hardest thing to watch in this movie is the dog flipping out of the SUV in the beginning of the film after it had been bludgeoned with a golf club. Thankfully we didn't actually see the morbid act.

Of course, no one ever likes it when a kid gets killed either, even if it is fictitious and you don't literally see him getting shot. The absolute calm and giddiness of both killers is chilling; behaving like the entire congestion of brutal acts are nothing more eventful than a simple stroll in the park on a summer's day. 

Both Watts and Roth give A+ performances in this twisted tale of murderous cat and mouse. The gore is minimal, there is no sexual barbarism or nudity, but the mind games these two unlikely serial psychotics use is just as torturous. Just when you think they are gone and there is some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, the game begins again. There are no happy endings with this feature film, only a recycling of madness and despair with the perpetuation of all-new players.

If you ever wanted to understand the process behind how a "crazy" murderer thinks, this is a great window into the realm of a conscienceless existence.

It appears on screen that these two white-gloved sadists also video tape the entire ordeal and they speak to the camera a few times during the movie -- I am not sure what that really means as I never saw them holding a video camera...that was actually a little confusing. Perhaps it is a little trick to make us wonder why we are watching in the first place. It actually takes away from the film's presence.

While the film is not a pleasant experience, it is interesting to venture down the road of these characters' psyches. It is a great find for film majors interested in learning more about character development and character-driven sequences.

Final Analysis: Funny Games is not funny at all, and does tend to drag on a bit too long in many places along the storyline. If you are a film student or a writer you may wish to study this when researching character development. If you like mindless brutality and psychotic mentality, you will love this film.

Starring: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt

This Reviewer's Rating: 3 / 5 

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