'Funny Games': Not so funny

In "Funny Games," a rich family is terrorized by members of the 1928 Yale tennis team.

At least that's how it looks. A couple of guys with white shorts, white shirts, low-cut sneakers and genteel manners worm their way inside the gated vacation home of a wealthy couple (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth).

What follows is a very measured study in accumulating tension - the young men seem to be polite, disarming, even harmless, but it gradually dawns on the couple that their home has been invaded, that the boys are psychopaths, and that it's kill or be killed.

This is all done with clinical detachment, without music or cutaways or any other commonplace thriller device. German director Michael Haneke (precisely remaking a European movie he did 10 years ago) isn't out to update "The Desperate Hours."

He's after some academic commentary on voyeurism and violence, which is probably why this mildly interesting movie ends up feeling at first tiresome, and, finally, like a cheat.

I don't exactly know where "Funny Games" went wrong for me, but casting is a possibility. The lead in this Leopold and Loeb-ish horror story is played by Michael Pitt, playing his 147th young weirdo, giving us the same dead-eye gaze through the same shock of Hitler hair that dangles in his eyes. You may kill dispassionately, my alt-rocker friend, but you're no Anton Chigurh, the sociopath portrayed so convincingly by Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men."

The movie really goes wrong, though, when Pitt's character turns toward the camera and begins addressing the audience directly. Some minutes later, Haneke injects another spell-busting gimmick that takes the proceedings to some kind of meta-fictional level.

Haneke appears to assume that we want these bad guys punished, and constructs little tricks to frustrate our desires. But sitting through this airless theater of the depraved was enough punishment.

If there is some deeper meaning here, it went way over my literal-minded head, and I was left wondering why I should continue to force myself to invest in this story.

I couldn't answer that question, and so I started thinking about lunch. This is a good thing (spoiler alert), because a few minutes later, Haneke kills a defenseless boy with a shotgun blast to the head.

I'm just square enough to be glad I didn't think that was real.*

Produced by Christian Baute, Chris Coen, Hamish McAlpine, Andro Steinborn.