Starring: Naomi Watts, Micahel Pitt, Tim Roth
Directed By: Michael Haneke

"Funny Games" is a pretentious car wreck. You want desperately to look away, but really need to find out how the wreck started. In your own mind, you try to make sense of it but really, you won't ever find what you're looking for.

The plot loosely revolves around two psychotic prepsters with too much time on their hands and the invasion of an unsuspecting family's beach house. The teens, ostensibly with no motive, subsequently torture this unfortunate family to no end. One of the torturers makes a bet with the family that they will not survive the night.

Not so subtly, however, does writer-director Michael Haneke turn around and put the audience in the spotlight. In the most obvious wink-wink ever, one of the torturers breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience directly, asking if they are enjoying themselves.

The film, a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of Haneke's 1997 film of the same name, thus becomes a commentary on the way people enjoy movies, specifically movies given the unfortunate label of "torture porn." Viewers will not only pay to see a movie like "Saw" or "Hostel," but they enjoy these films. No matter how sickening the events, movie franchises like "Saw" are kept alive through the audience's own vicariousness.

A valiant effort on Haneke's part in dissecting the American cinematic mindset, both he and the movie ultimately fails because of self-awareness. If the ultra-violence and the theme of the film sound at all familiar, then, congratulations, you have seen Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange."

However, never once in Kubrick's famed film, does Malcolm McDowell turn to the audience and explain what they should be getting out of the film. Haneke, a German, seems to insult his American audience. In fact, he re-made his film specifically for American audiences.

Moviegoers don't need a character in the film to talk to them directly and tell them they get off on watching others squirm. Just look how many people watch "The Moment of Truth." Viewers know this is true, yet he uses his otherwise great idea as a vehicle of criticism for the American movie-going public. It makes the film less enjoyable, but also less compelling, making it easier to have more respect for the movies "Funny Games" shakes its finger at.

Trying to flaunt their dominating powers over this poor family, the two boys often check their watch to see how much time remains before they have to kill the family one by one. Viewers, too, find themselves frequently checking the time to see how much more of Haneke's nonsense they have to take.

When all is said and done, "Funny Games" is nothing more than ostentatious torture porn with great camera angles and a failed commentary on the way people watch movies.