Packing a punch
ROAD HOUSE Cert 15 ★★★
On Prime Video from March 21
We didn’t have “Jake Gyllenhaal and Conor McGregor go head-to-head in a bare-knuckle brawl” on our bingo card of must-see moments for 2024, but director Doug Liman’s frenetically choreographed action thriller delivers a full house of testosterone-fuelled fun.
The pair’s intense final showdown delivers an exhilarating rush of blood to the head we never knew we needed.
Irish mixed martial artist McGregor makes a flamboyant entrance mid-way through the contemporary reworking of Road House, inexplicably in his birthday suit. Fittingly, he packs a punch as a psychotic, showboating lunatic-for-hire who trades in one currency: physical pain.
Thirty-five years ago, Patrick Swayze sandwiched the bruised knuckles and swaggering machismo of the original Road
House between the swooninducing romance of Dirty
Dancing and Ghost.
It’s been almost a decade since Gyllenhaal trained intensively to replicate the muscular physicality and snarling mentality of a light heavyweight boxer in the hard-slugging sports drama Southpaw.
He showcases a similar imposing, bone-crunching presence here as former UFC fighter Elwood Dalton, who is living out of his car and struggling to make ends meet.
Weary bar owner Frankie ( Jessica Williams) offers him “good money” to purge her ailing business in the Florida Keys of unwanted, rowdy clientele.
Could these ugly altercations, which drive away custom, be connected to the drinking den’s location on prime real estate earmarked by crime boss Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) for a luxury development? Dialogue in Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry’s ham-fisted script induces almost as many winces as characters’ punches, but when you drink at this Road House, you don’t expect to chug intricate plotting or plausibility.
Brawn trumps brains and if you spar with Liman’s picture on those crude terms, his film comes out swinging.
‘‘ McGregor plays a showboating lunatic-forhire who trades in pain