Reviewing a remake of Road House is like reviewing a classroom of schoolkids who make those hand turkeys around Thanksgiving. It doesn’t take much, just an outline, and let the kids’ imagination do the rest. You can’t really critique it because it’s no way near high art, but if a child put a lot of thought into it, it’s not bad.
The 1989 version with Patrick Swayze, Sam Elliott, Kelly Lynch and Ben Gazzara, is a neo-western action thriller that didn’t take itself too seriously in an era when action movies were a dime a dozen. Roddy Piper and Brian Bosworth were branching out appearing in crazy action movies you’d find yourself watching on a Sunday night because you knew the work/school week was ahead and you didn’t care. The weekend was over. But you were still holding on.
The movie was a hodgepodge of cliches and stuntmen in probably their biggest roles up until then. Even though it’s set outside of Kansas City, any damned fool can see it’s the southern California area. So a remake set 35 years later made by Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal could’ve taken itself too seriously. But it doesn’t either. When you have a lot of bikers walking in and throwing stools and chairs around like one-dimensional buffoons, you know it’s not to be taken seriously.
Gyllenhaal is again playing a person named Dalton, but this time it’s Elwood Dalton. And he’s not a bouncer/cooler but a troubled former UFC middleweight fighter who makes a living scamming fighters on the underground circuit. Frankie (Jessica Williams) is the owner of a bar in the Florida Keys called The Road House. It’s located in the community of Glass Key, one of those non-existent communities that only seem to exist in these movies. There’s not many businesses and the Road House looks like it doesn’t get enough business for Frankie to pay the staff, musicians, and the outrageous insurance as well as give Dalton $5,000 a week to help clean it up.
But what does it matter? This is a movie where people get into fights. And since it’s 2024 and not 1989, characters in movies can’t just throw punches like they used to. No, we have to see a lot of roundhouse kicks and long takes as they toss another character over their shoulder and body slam them on a wooden table breaking it. And it has to be stylish in a long take that has been cleverly edited together to look like a long take. I don’t know where Frankie is getting all this bread from to keep the place open but it looks like the county health board and OSHA would’ve shut it down a long time ago.
Even with a big-ass truck slams into the front of the building, some patrons still want to get a drink. Dalton manages to stay on Frankie’s derelict house boat which raises the question of how does he bathe, since it looks like you need a tetanus shot after one night. There’s a sweaty old Seminole who warns him of a crocodile that hangs abouts, which you know will reappear when a goon tries to get Dalton on the houseboat. Ellie (Daniella Melchior) is the local doctor who is Dalton’s love interest who gets mad at him for beating up the bikers making work busy for their staff. I can see why she gets mad. Everyone else is probably got food poisoning or some other ailments from the exposures of Glass Key.
But there’s also the crooked Sheriff Big Dick (Joaquim de Almedia) who just happens to be Kellie’s crooked father. Big Dick is in cahoots with Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) who runs everything since his father’s in the joint like a 16-year-old who was given a blank check by their parents for groceries who went on a two-week vacation and loaded everything down with junk food.
The script is co-written by David Lee Henry, the screen name for R. Lance Hill, who also wrote the first movie. He got the idea reportedly from stopping at a scuzzy dive bar near Dalton, Ga. He wanted to write the story as a classic western but they had lost popularity by the late 1980s so it was rewritten as a modern-day neo-western where characters have western names (James Dalton, Brad Wesley, Wade Garrett, Emmett, Red and even Lynch’s character was called Doc.)
Apparently there’s some plot about Ben wanting to take over the Road House because Frankie is the last hold-out. Ben is wanting to build a resort so that’s why he send goons like Dell (JD Pardo) to wreck the bar and make Frankie sell. It doesn’t really matter. Drug smuggling and real estate intimidation seem to be the go-to causes for bad guys in movies like this.
The good news is everyone plays their roles perfectly. After playing a nice guy wanting to help a teenage girl in Missing, de Almeida plays on the crooked sheriff role with the thick head mentality. Magnusson plays the spoiled brat perfectly that when he receives his fate, you almost want to applaud, even though this movie is just streaming on Amazon Prime. Gyllenhaal understands he has to play Dalton a little cocky and reacts to getting stabbed in the lower abdomen as if it happens all the time.
As for Conor McGregor, who was used a lot in marketing, his role is more of a glorified cameo. He appears about half-way through as Knox, a hired goon, by Ben’s father, who’s in prison. (I felt there was supposed to be a deleted scene of Ben’s father but this movie clocks in at 121 minutes with credits, so it was cut.) McGregor overacts, but he overacts in a good way. Mainly his goal is to fight people and the fight between him and Gyllenhaal is not one to be missed. Even Dalton takes off his shirt so the two men can flex their sweaty, bloody muscles.
Like I said, if you’re expecting a thought-provoking movie about the brutality of violence in men, go see Raging Bull. This is as Martin Scorsese would say, a popcorn movie. And Liman directs it with all the cheesy machismo of the original. Liman has made Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into action heroes as well as knowing audiences would get a helluva laugh on seeing Tom Cruise dying multiple times (sometimes very comically) in Edge of Tomorrow.
It’s a shame Amazon, which now owns MGM Studios which distributed the movie, didn’t release it in theaters. I think audiences would’ve gotten a kick (ha-ha!) out of seeing it on the big screen. Reports indicate that Gyllenhaal and others have begun work on a sequel. Hopefully, it will be released in theaters.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 