Funny Games is a practically shot-by-shot English-language remake of the 1997 German-language film by the Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke. The picture, remade by the maestro Haneke himself, is every bit as gripping, suspenseful and upsetting as the original. And it's even more of a crock.

Haneke is a very accomplished filmmaker and, more importantly in this case, an extremely intelligent man. He is not quite so intelligent, though, that he's able to recognize a really bad idea when one occurs to him. Funny Games purports to condemn mass media and cinematic violence by positing two extremely polite young psychos — products of our media culture, supposedly —against a decent bourgeois family of three, vacationing at their isolated lake house. The two white-clad preppies (Corbet and Pitt) take the trio (Roth, Watts, and little Gearhart, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Nikolai Burlyayev of Tarkovsky's 1962 Ivan's Childhood) hostage, subjecting them to a series of increasingly sadistic games, meant to culminate in the family's extermination. Every now and then Pitt's character, the smarter of the two psychos, turns to the camera and addresses the audience: "You're on their side, aren't you?" he asks early on; later, he says, "You want a real ending, with plausible plot development."

Well, that would have been nice, actually. Haneke was particularly eager to remake the picture in English, in an American setting, because the film, you see, is about America. Never mind that the conceit of a married couple playing "guess the classical music piece" with their car's CD player (in the opening scene) strikes one as slightly, you know, European.

Throughout the picture, Haneke demonstrates an imperial hauteur that completely undercuts his already dubious point. After having his characters establish the unreality of the piece by addressing the camera, he then depicts, as realistically as contemporary cinematic technology will allow, the very real pain and humiliation suffered by victims of actual violence. He employs, with great deliberation, some hoary genre tropes, such as a dog that is the only sentient being to immediately sense the true evil of the home invaders. Haneke's deck-stacking turns truly egregious during a scene in which the family's kid, Georgie, escapes from the psychos and takes shelter in a nearby house; followed by Pitt's character, he tries to resist. In a normal genre film the kid could conceivably be expected to score some kind of triumph, staving off the bad guy. But of course that doesn't happen: little Georgie behaves just like a real kid, and gives the game away. But where Haneke's victims are all too human — they cry, they bleed, they puke, they soil themselves, just as any of us would do in their situation — his villains are as even more superhumanly undefeatable as your average Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger, to the point where they never even stain their white gloves. Aha! The fact that they don't stain their white gloves must be deliberate, then. Indeed, but to what end? Haneke's finally the one playing an insulting game with his audience, whoever he hopes his audience to be. I imagine he thinks he's going to teach a lesson to all the kids who lap up the likes of Hostel, but I've got news for him: those people don't go see Michael Haneke films, no matter how cleverly they're marketed. Haneke here is only preaching to the suggestible — people who are likely to think that his final twist, in which he offers the viewers catharsis and then snatches it back in the most meretricious, not to mention inane, method possible, is a stroke of genius. And yes, there are people out there who will buy it. I know some of them — folks who keen like banshees about civil liberties every time Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman open their yaps about Hollywood or video game excess, but who are perfectly willing to genuflect at Haneke's deeply dishonest vision before heading to the fainting couch to snurfily condemn America's deeply deplorable taste for violence.

Some random thoughts I experience while watching the film, if you're interested: "Leopold and Loeb existed many years before Beavis and Butthead. Also, Beavis and Butthead references are really dated. Sadism is named for a French writer, dude. Yes, that piece of John Zorn music certainly seems violent, but given the formalist context in which it was created and in which it resides, it's actually only 'violent.' TV remote controls don't actually work that way with TV content, and never have, jackass."

"There's a lot of blood in Pierrot le Fou," an interviewer noted to Jean Luc Godard back in 1965. "Not blood, red," Godard shrugged. Haneke, on the other hand, insists that if it's depicted, it's as good as real, and underscores that point by giving his killers some philosophical dialogue about simulated worlds at the very end. Not terribly convincing stuff, as it happens, and a bit too-little-too-late after Haneke's high-handed deck-stacking. Funny Games is an accomplished film — the actors in particular do absolutely first-rate work all around (if I ever see Michael Pitt in person again, for instance, I'm really gonna have to restrain myself) — but my ultimate advice to movie lovers is to spare yourselves some needless abuse and not bother to play at all.