The Daily Telegraph - Features
Jake Gyllenhaal’s remake is pure entertainment
Road House 15 cert, 121 min ★★★★★ Dir Doug Liman Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Billy Magnussen, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor, Jessica Wiliams, Lukas Gage
There are two major problems with the new remake of Road House, though fortunately or frustratingly – maybe both – they have almost nothing to do with the film. The first is that it has been sent straight to Amazon Prime Video, when it obviously belongs in the cinema, with roomfuls of strangers wincing in unison at every splintered and/or minced appendage.
The second is that it only barely qualifies as a remake of Road House in the first place. Yes, it concerns a charismatic drifter with a past – here played by Jake Gyllenhaal – who ends up protecting a rag-tag community from a local kingpin and his goons. But this is also the plot of countless classic westerns, from Shane to Pale Rider: all that set the 1989 original apart from those is it took place in then-present-day smalltown Missouri, and rather than a Remington or Colt, Patrick Swayze preferred martial arts.
At times while watching this new version, I found myself wondering if writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry had initially come up with a standalone script of that general type – before someone in a development meeting said, “Hang on, isn’t this a bit like that popular Eighties film where Swayze goes around with his shirt off all the time?”, and from out of the ether rang a ghostly ker-ching. In other words, this is Road House-the-sort-of-remake which, with a few adjustments, needn’t have been one at all. But the branding will doubtless draw a larger audience to a film that will repay their curiosity with crunchy panache.
Gyllenhaal’s Dalton, like Swayze’s, is a mixed martial artist. At a clandestine brawl in a barn, he’s hired by Jessica Williams’s Frankie to work as a bouncer at her Florida watering hole – a loveable dump that Ben Brandt, Billy Magnussen’s mad-eyed property baron, is just itching to bulldoze. Dalton spends his evenings flattening the henchmen that Brandt sends his way, though at first he’s nice enough to drive them to the hospital afterwards. In a fight, he’s by turns apologetic and genial – traits Gyllenhaal makes hugely appealing and amusing – and as in the original, his adversaries-slash-victims are all vividly sketched. (The one with good manners is a particular comic masterstroke.)
Director Doug Liman uses some of his old Bourne Identity tricks, along with a number of new ones, to make the combat wildly exciting and visceral, even before Conor McGregor shows up. In his first screen role, the Ultimate Fighting Championship star arrives around halfway through the film as a psychopathic enforcer, lobbed into the mix by Brandt’s incarcerated dad. By most ordinary measures, McGregor’s performance would be awful. Here, though, playing the worst person you’ve ever met, it’s ideal. He’s both a puckish agent of chaos and a terrifying minotaur, and the final bout between him and Gyllenhaal does not fall short.
Perhaps it’s a pity that the original’s sleazy gleam is gone, and Dalton’s romance with doctor Ellie (Daniela Melchior) is conspicuously chaste. But this is otherwise rough-hewn, hardbitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.
On Amazon Prime Video now