‘Road House’
if the spirit’s right and a movie takes some downtime for love scenes between beat-downs?
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, scandal-clouded 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 bonecrunch 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
MPA rating: R (for violence throughout, pervasive language and some nudity)
Running time: How to watch: 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 datenight 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