PULLING PUNCHES
‘Road House’ 30 times bloodier, one-third as fun as original
Writing about movies means succumbing to occasional bouts of reductive-itis, inspired by that great bonehead critic Emperor Joseph II in “Amadeus,” who told Mozart nice job on his latest composition, with one caveat: “too many notes.”
Folks, this week has been one of those bouts. First, it was the new “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” (verdict: too much “heart” and digital mayhem, not enough funny). And now, streaming on Prime Video, we have another ’80s-derived throwback, the “Road House” remake with Jake Gyllenhaal.
The 1989 Patrick Swayze edition, co-starring Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Kathleen Wilhoite and, singing along with “Sh-Boom,” Ben Gazzara, was nothing but ridiculous trash. And fun. Calling it “human-scaled” makes the old “Road House” sound as if it took place somewhere on planet Earth, among humans, which isn’t really true. And yet who says we can’t enjoy a sustained feat of complete fraudulence, if the spirit’s right and a movie takes some downtime for love scenes between beatdowns?
The new “Road House” has no time for sex. Compared with the old one, it’s 30 times bloodier and one-third as fun. Still, there are things to recommend it, namely the Irishman.
The action has been relocated from outside Kansas City to the fictional Glass Key, Florida. Screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry establish bouncer Dalton as a suicidal, scandalclouded Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight with more baggage than Swayze’s Dalton ever lugged. Traveling by Greyhound, Dalton has come to the Florida Keys to take a job at the beachfront bar owned by Frankie (Jessica Williams). She needs a legit set of abs to control her insanely unruly customers and keep the peace.
That Dalton does, violently. Director Doug Liman escalates the bone-crunch melees with propulsive crimson relish, albeit with tons of editing cheats and medium-good digital trickery. The narrative obstacles in “Road House” carry over from the ’89 movie; there’s a corrupt crime family running amok, with Billy Magnussen amusingly detestable as the primary scumbag. Once again, a discreetly smoldering local doctor (Daniela Melchior) patches up Dalton after his initial run-in with the local rabble, and sees this mysterious, courtly stranger as potential date-night material.
The old “Road House” dripped with casually rampant misogyny disguised as examples of the ungentlemanly bad behavior Dalton must vanquish. Most of that ambiance is gone here. So is any trace of actual sensual anything. The central “romance” this time barely registers. Reductively, you could put it this way: Liman’s “Road House” gets the job done, but it’s the wrong job, and the ratios are off. When movie fantasies like this reduce the sexual current between its leads to nil, the emphasis on crazier and crazier brutality starts feeling not just jaded, or bloodthirsty, but a drag.
On the other hand, you know who’s great in this? Conor McGregor, best known as an Irish UFC star, making his feature debut in “Road House” as Knox, the special guest assailant the bad guys hire to dispose of Dalton. McGregor’s a born entertainer, delightfully overripe and dementedly committed to every close-up and every strutting threat of grievous bodily harm. His bare bottom gets a wittily star-making entrance of its own, in a traveling shot that goes so long, it’s basically a “Road House” spinoff.
Gyllenhaal has his moments; he finds some wit in Dalton’s zingers, and in his scenes with the local bookstore owner’s teenage daughter (Hannah Love Lanier), the star gets a pleasant “Shane” vibe going. To be sure, “Road House” succumbs to its own bouts of reductivist critique, or self-critique. At one point the scrappy, baseball batwielding kid summarizes the stranger’s arrival in Western movie genre terms: “Local townsfolk send for hero to help clean up the rowdy saloon.” Then she adds: “You know. That crap.”