The Least Funny Games

The film "Funny Games" (the 2007 English remake of Michael Haneke's own 1997 Austrian crime thriller) is a no fun, very bad punishment - one we endure without doing anything to deserve it.
I enjoy difficult and challenging art films and picked this one up as a recommendation. I was ready to be impressed, or at least to be engaged in novelty.

But this movie was like watching the snot of a better one drip off the screen and being forced to lick it up. The meritorious craft of the production is ultimately lost in just how cruel, empty, and arbitrary it amounts to be. It is degrading to everyone involved, pretentiously nihilistic, and offers no narrative semblance for what it is doing, why it is doing it, or why we should care. Rather, it cheerfully takes us hostage without any demands and annihilates everyone involved without any negotiations.

And if the rejoinder is that audiences don't have to understand or don't have to care about the film they're watching, I would merely suggest this: don't even bother to watch "Funny Games" in the conventional way, as the director intended. Instead, re-edit the film yourself with the ending you know is already there.

Or better yet, just put it on, walk out, and do something better with your life for 111 minutes. That's the best way to watch this movie.

No-Piercer

Dear Snowpiercer, I haven't gone in with higher expectations or left with more disappointment in a very long time.

What were they thinking?

This film has some laudable ambition, a solid cast, fantastic production design, and a premise that is interesting and original enough to hold great promise. Apparently, many reviewers really liked it given the film's 84/100 on Metacritic. I can recognize those worthwhile elements.

SPOILER ALERT
But they absolutely do not add up. The film earns its gory R rating but has some incredibly childish dialogue that belongs in a young adult novel. Yes, Tilda Swinton does very well with her role and there are some other notable successes in the cast (the classroom scene was by far the most well-directed). And Chris Evans carries the film well enough except for a macabre monologue about eating babies (can a good guy ever eat babies?).

But not since "The Matrix Reloaded" have I seen such a clumsy, unsatisfying deus ex machina. Ed Harris channels his role from "The Truman Show" here with a fumbling finale that underwhelms and feels almost insulting to sit through. After a two hour train ride, this really isn't where we should be getting off.

What's worse, the film is all too eager to kill off basically every character we meet and grow to care about, leaving us with very little worth rooting for when the small band of surviving characters finally escape from their Flakes on a Train experience.

And what do we have left? A totally unsurvivable wilderness that cannot possibly sustain these untrained and ill-equipped passengers. Nobody seems to have thought this through - not the characters, not the filmmakers. By nightfall, temperatures will drop and they will desperately flee back into the train they just blew up in order to salvage whatever they can to build a habitable environment in their former prison. Where is Matt Damon from "The Martian" when we need him?

So we're left with a trite and superficial meditation on classism and population control, a banal plot twist involving child labor, and a vague cautionary tail against geoengineering. I was truly hoping that the antagonist's big reveal was the frozen landscape being an intentional act by the train's designer to purge humanity and rule the remaining world from within his train car. But what we get is much simpler - and the realization that the film has greatly over-promised and under-delivered.

Best case scenario: the polar bear brings in his family to feast on the sorry lot of human corpses strewn about for half a mile. THE END

Or a happier ending would be if the polar bear attacked the survivors until Leonardo DiCaprio shows up to suplex the bear, tame it, and then teach everyone how to build igloos and go ice fishing.  THE END