Funny Games (2008)

Ever heard of the game Postal 2? In the game, there are very long load times and incredibly annoying music, meant to piss you off. This movie is like Postal 2. Except, in that game, you get to take out your frustrations by killing people. No such luck here. There is no catharsis, no satisfactory ending, nothing at all to make you feel good. It's just a steaming pile of shit.

At first, you can't even tell that this is a horror movie. For a good, long time, nothing happens. You get a feel for the three family members, but mostly, it's just a bunch of shots of them living their normal lives. Then, a young man appears asking for some eggs, and nothing happens for another ten minutes. There's some suspense, because you know this guy is one of the bad guys, because that's what all the trailers say, and that's just how the movie goes, but because you know all this, it's not that satisfying. That, and the fact that it takes forever for something to actually happen. A woman walking into the room where Michael Myers is hiding, that's suspenseful. A shot of the woman reading a magazine for ten minutes while Michael stands in the closet, that's boring.

When the movie finally starts up, the response isn't, "Man, this is going to be so cool." Right from the get go, you feel uncomfortable. The violence is real. Too real, as a matter of fact. It's not exaggerated, and the people don't deserve it in the least. It is pure violence for the sake of violence. No laughs. No gory special effects. No way to not take it seriously. It will make you feel like shit. And the violence isn't the only unsavory part of the movie. There are a ton of useless scenes here. For example, there's "watch man blow-dry a cell phone for a full minute" and "exterior of a house during the middle of the night, with indistinct sounds, for thirty seconds." These are pointless and serve no purpose other than to piss off the audience even more.

Now, some movies make you feel like shit while watching it, only to make you love them afterwards, because they've said something important or true. This is the case with Requiem for a Dream and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Funny Games is not one of those movies. There is absolutely nothing to learn, no big truths about the world, no redeeming factor of any kind, in this movie. At the end, you will feel like crap, and you will have learned nothing. You'll have wasted an hour and fifty minutes, all for nothing. I wish I had never watched this movie. I wish I had instead spent the time watching reruns of Roseanne. That would have been a better use of my time.