What to stream: Revisit films of Jake Gyllenhaal before Road House
Doug Liman’s reboot of the hit 1989 action flick Road House streams on Prime Video today, re-imagining the Patrick Swayze-starring movie about a bouncer who’s a “fighting philosopher,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role.
Now the first rule of enjoying the new Road House is to try and forget about the old Road House, which has become a cult classic. Of course, you can always stream the original, directed by Rowdy Herrington, on Prime Video, Max and Showtime (or take in Andy’s re-creation of the climax in Season 4, Episode 20 of Parks and Recreation on Crave). But you’ll have more fun taking the new film as its own thing, just borrowing the premise and title to create a new salty, sweaty, shaggy meathead classic.
It’s quite alright if Road House simply serves as a structure upon which to hang the specific persona of a movie star. In the original, Swayze was the soulful bard of the barroom brawl; in this new version, Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to be Swayze. His version of Dalton is a former MMA fighter who heads for a road house in the Keys at the behest of Frankie (Jessica Williams). He’s an odd duck, and Gyllenhaal leans into the quirky persona he’s honed over the past few years.
Gyllenhaal may be a leading man with heartthrob looks, but he has gravitated toward more challenging and offbeat roles, starting with Donnie Darko in 2001 (Prime Video). In the past few years, he’s amped up the action, and leaned further into strange and unpredictable characters.
Take, for example, Ambulance, the 2022 Michael Bay ripper, in which Gyllenhaal’s Danny Sharp hijacks an ambulance as a part of a bank heist and takes it on a joyride around Los Angeles. Gyllenhaal is in on the joke in this amped up action movie, his tone perfectly matching Bay’s signature outlandish style. Stream it on Crave.
In another L.A.-set thriller, Gyllenhaal was transformed in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, starring as Louis Bloom, a police scanner-chasing amateur “journalist” selling gruesome crime scene footage to TV news stations. His edgy Louis lives on the fringes of society, hoping for a big break, like so many dreamers in the city of angels. Stream it on Paramount+.
He also displayed his wackier side in supporting roles in Bong Joon Ho’s 2017 creature feature Okja, 2019’s Velvet Buzzsaw, Gilroy’s art world send-up, and the comedy special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch. Stream all three on Netflix.
But he’s also developed his action bona fides too, including in the underrated drama Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant from 2023, in which he brings his signature intensity to an American veteran seeking the Afghan interpreter who helped save him (Prime Video). He also did some sci-fi in 2017 with the Alien homage Life, on Prime Video.
But perhaps the performance that puts it all together is, surprisingly, the Marvel movie Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), in which he plays, well, a mysterious villain named Mysterio (aka Quentin Beck). Only Gyllenhaal could play a character that is that bizarre and compelling in a Marvel movie opposite Tom Holland and truly make it work. Rent it on digital platforms.