Ten years after director Michael Haneke unleashed his chillingly manipulative thriller on a swooning European art house audience he's having another pop.

Apparently his so-called subversion of violence didn't reach the desired crowd - a baying American mob unsated by the likes of Hostel and Saw - because it was a foreign language film and nobody had a clue who the stars were.

This time out he painstakingly reconstructs the 1997 movie frame-by-frame...but the subtitles are gone and bankable players like Tim Roth and Naomi Watts inhabit the main roles.

They play George and Anna, a middle class couple (they play "which opera?" in their SUV) who are holidaying with their young son Georgie at a lakeside holiday home.

However, their idyll is shattered with the arrival of Paul (Pitt) and Peter (Corbet), an outwardly charming pair of young men with a healthy appreciation of golf.

However, it's only when Peter smashes George's kneecap off with an iron that it becomes apparent that these two - with their cold-eyed smiles and insistent courtesy - are not good to be around.

What follows is a sickening downward spiral as the terrified family is held hostage and subjected to an increasingly violent series of humiliations...and then worse.

"I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being," says Haneke, who doesn't provide an explanation for the urbane savagery of his white-gloved sociopaths.

So the audience never gets a moral handle on the torturers or what drives them in what is ultimately art house torture porn.

There's also no real chance of an audience who get off on Rambo and Die Hard sitting through a bizarrely pointless psychological thriller from a humourless German.

In the original, the sheer foreign-ness of the protagonists - particularly Arno Frisch's glacial Paul - lent a distinct chill but here they're like malevolent marionettes.

And the celebrity status of both Roth and Watts - while delivering first class performances - damages the anonymity of Paul and George that made their original versions so convincing.

Crucially, the anguished, almost primal howl, that met one of the original movie's most disturbing turning points is also missing.

First time round, there was a lot to admire...but very little to like.

Now we're left with a knowing, smug wallow in misery whose new audience is basically the same as the old one...but with less tolerance for subtitles.

Tim Evans