At this point, I suppose that I need to confess that I have never quite venerated the cult favorite cable staple Road House to the extent that so many others have done in the years since its 1989 debut—I like it just fine (I even saw it during its original theatrical release) but I must confess that as intentionally absurdist fenderhead action spectacles from that particular era go, I have always been a little more partial to the likes of Stone Cold and Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man. That said, that film comes across like an unassailable masterpiece in comparison to Doug Liman’s remake, a lazy and hackneyed example of IP exploitation that so misses the mark that you get the sense that those involved never actually saw the original, let alone managed to grasp its goofball charms.
Stepping into the shoes (and out of the shirt) of Patrick Swayze, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Eldwood Dalton, a former UFC fighter with a troubled past (the kind revealed in gradually expanding flashbacks) who is recruited by Frankie (Jessica Williams) to come to work for her taming the rowdy crowds at the Florida Keys roadhouse that she owns (which is called the Road House, ho-ho). As it turns out, the place is located on a valuable piece of beachfront property coveted by unscrupulous developer Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who will do whatever it takes to acquire it. When Dalton stands up to his wide array of hired goons (even driving some of them to the hospital after delivering beatdowns), Brandt’s imprisoned father calls in psychotic hit man Knox (MMA fighter Conor McGregor), leading to a climactic orgy of boat chases, explosions and shirtless beatdowns galore.
The one thing that this new iteration of Road House manages to accomplish is to illustrate, if only inadvertently, that the pleasures of the original ran deeper than its subsequent mock-ironic appreciations might suggest. Sure, the whole thing was preposterous as can be but the casting of Patrick Swayze as a Tai Chi-studying philosophy student-turned-bar bouncer who could break heads and hearts in equal measure was such an inspired usage of his aura of holy cool that it almost made one of the most potentially ludicrous characters in screen history seem almost plausible. The film also made the wise move of surrounding him with seasoned professionals (such as Kelly Lynch, Ben Gazzara and the great Sam Elliott) who knew that the best way to approach such silliness was to deftly underplay it.
Here, Gyllenhaal may have achieved the bod of a fearsome former UFC champ but you never buy him in the role for a second—he lacks the laid-back attitude that the part requires and he demonstrates zero chemistry with co-star Daniela Melchior (in the Lynch role). As the chief villain, Magnussen is so forgettable that he fades from memory even while he is in the middle of the scene. Alas, you will not have that problem with McGregor, no matter how much you may wish to forget him—in a blustery turn that suggests what might result if someone tried to genetically splice the DNA of Yosemite Sam and Gerard Butler, he delivers a performance that is certainly more energetic than anyone else is able to muster but ends up growing very monotonous very quickly. Even the fight scenes turn out to be weird misfires—although Liman has shown a flair for such things in such past efforts as the Jason Bourne films, the brawls eventually grow tiresome after a while and the crashingly obvious CGI insertions do not help matters much.
Whatever the flaws that the original Road House may have contained, it at least had a certain purity about it—it was nonsensical trash, to be sure, but of a kind that was so direct that only a churl could walk away from it without some degree of affection for it. This version, on the other hand, exists only because the notoriety of the original ensures that a suitable number of eyes will be trained on it to make the folks at Amazon Prime, if few others, reasonably happy. It is so bereft of anything of value that it makes the equally ill-advised and long-forgotten remake of another Swayze action favorite, Point Break, seem focused and committed by comparison. Oddly enough, people have been trying to reboot Road House for quite a while now (at one point, if I recall correctly, it was going to be a gender-flipped version with Rhonda Rousey in the lead) but by the time this one comes to its merciful, if barely coherent, conclusion, most of you will be wondering why the hell they bothered in the first place.