Remake of fun, trashy 1989 movie just bloodthirsty drag
The original “Road House” — starring Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Kathleen Wilhoite and singing along with “Sh-Boom,” Ben Gazzara — was nothing but fun, ridiculous trash. 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?
But this “Road House” remake has no time for sex. Compared with the 1989 version, it’s 30 times bloodier and one-third as fun. Still, there are things to get excited about, 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 (Jake Gyllenhaal) 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 a beachfront bar owned by Frankie (Jessica Williams). She needs a legit set of abs to control her 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 digital trickery. The narrative obstacles in “Road House” carry over from the original; 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 stranger as potential date-night material.
Swayze’s “Road
House” drips 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 sensuality. The central “romance” this time barely registers. Reductively, you could say 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.
Conor McGregor, best known as an Irish UFC star, makes an excellent feature debut as Knox, the special guest assailant the bad guys hire to dispose of Dalton. McGregor’s a born entertainer, delightfully overripe and committed to every strutting threat of grievous bodily harm.
Gyllenhaal has his moments; he finds some wit in Dalton’s zingers, and in his scenes with the local bookstore owner’s teen daughter (Hannah Love Lanier), the star gets a pleasant “Shane” vibe going.
To be sure, “Road House” succumbs to reductivist critique, or self-critique. At one point, the scrappy, baseball bat-wielding kid summarizes the stranger’s arrival in Western film-genre terms: “Local townsfolk send for hero to help clean up the rowdy saloon.” Then, she adds: “You know. That crap.”
MPA rating: R (for nudity, violence, alcohol use and foul language)
Running time: 1:54
How to watch: Amazon Prime Video