I don’t like remakes. In fact, if there’s one thing in cinema I dislike more than remakes, it’s remakes of my
The Ring. Utter toss.
favourite movies. Take The Ring, a particularly fine example of ruining a masterpiece in the process of diluting it for a more mainstream audience. It throws in all sorts of inexplicable and pointless devices (isn’t that the horse from the Lloyds TV ads? What??), waters down the complexities of what wasn’t even a very complicated story in the first place, and then, for the coup de grace, spoils one of the greatest sequences in horror movie history (you know the one I mean), by interspersing it with a CAR CHASE. Yeah, thanks. The source material is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and the result barely passes muster as a low-rent B-movie.
I’m not even convinced by the argument that these films put the original in front of a wider audience
- sure, some people might check out the original afterwards, but the vast majority won’t. Look at the latest 
packaging for the original movie, which is now debasing itself as ‘the original movie that inspired The Ring‘. Even worse, it also ‘inspired’ a whole load of other J-horror remakes, which also led to a piss-weak version of The Eye, and now they’re even working their way through the B-list J-horror stable like One Missed Call (see 2003’s Chakushin ari). As a side note, isn’t it depressing that Blockbuster (and possibly others) not only brief their staff to warn customers that a film they’re renting is subtitled (oh shit, is it? I’ll put it back then. Don’t want any of that foreign muck. Where’s Phone Booth?), but even subtitle warning stickers on their DVDs?
So it was with some trepidation that I approached Funny Games (or Funny Games U.S. to give it its full title), even though it’s a shot-by-shot remodelling by Michael Haneke of the incredible original, not least because it features queen of remakes Naomi Watts, who played her part in ruiningThe Ring and pouted her way through THREE HOURS of monkey nonsense in King Kong. And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Taken in isolation, it’s actually a great film, and it’s excellent to see some of the Haneke trademarks like long, unbroken sequences conducted almost in silence, and total bleakness come through in a more mainstream movie. What’s more, it goes some way to showing up those tawdry horror-porn peddlers like Eli Roth up as the amateurs they are.
Naomi Watts is excellent throughout (and was specifically requested by Haneke), and it’s good to see her stretching herself in something interesting after the big-budget remakes maligned above. Tim Roth vascillates between a decent performance and hamming up his Mr Orange face (lots of wounded growling). The ten-minute, single-take post-torture scene is brilliantly executed, as in the Austrian version. Where it falls down, if anywhere, is with Michael ‘face of Emporio Armani’ Pitt as torturer-in-chief Paul, who frequently translates the brutal, impassive politeness of his character into something wooden and stilted, rather than harrowing and menacing. Arno Frisch in Haneke’s original puts on an fantastic performance that’s genuinely unsettling, and predictably his shoes are the hardest in the film to fill, and this is ultimately the biggest let-down for me. But in demonstrating that the film’s as relevant now as it was ten years ago, and bringing something properly disturbing into the mainstream, it’s a real success.
What’s next? Jack Black killing his entire family in The Seventh Continent U.S.? Benny’s Video set in Dawson’s Creek…?
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