Road House review – our house is a very, very, very bland house

One of my favourite pieces of media from this cen­tu­ry is a YouTube clip which orig­i­nat­ed in 2016, enti­tled ​‘British Lads Hit Each Oth­er With Chair‘. In it, a shirt­less lad in jeans and train­ers gives anoth­er shirt­less lad (in run­ning shorts) a lit­tle kiss before tak­ing a swig from a bot­tle of wine, which he smash­es on the floor, also throw­ing his cig­a­rette to the ground. Anoth­er lad scam­pers into frame and picks the cig­a­rette up. The lad in run­ning shorts then pro­ceeds to hit the lad in jeans across the back with a fold­ing gar­den chair for a bit, before he col­laps­es. In 67 sec­onds they pro­vide as close to per­fect depic­tion of mod­ern male mas­culin­i­ty as cur­rent­ly exists in British cin­e­ma. To wit, the video demon­strates the endur­ing, mes­meris­ing pow­er of see­ing some­one get­ting duffed up.

David Lee Hen­ry and co-writer Hilary Henkin under­stood this when they penned the script for Road House back in the 1980s – as did Row­dy Her­ring­ton, who direct­ed the film in a remark­able demon­stra­tion of nom­i­na­tive deter­min­ism. Although the 1989 action­er star­ring Patrick Swayze as a sto­ic cool­er work­ing in a rough-n-ready Mis­souri bar was a crit­i­cal flop, it’s since earned cult clas­sic sta­tus, as well as the hon­our of becom­ing a run­ning joke on Fam­i­ly Guy. It makes sense that some 35 years lat­er Ama­zon would want to remake the film – this is par for the course in Hol­ly­wood nowa­days, with Point Break, Flat­lin­ers, Total Recall and Red Dawn among the 80s/​90s cult films that received dis­ap­point­ing revamps in the 2000s.

But the set-up for the Road House remake wasn’t with­out mer­it. Doug Liman cer­tain­ly has form for action, hav­ing direct­ed the excel­lent Edge of Tomor­row and The Bourne Iden­ti­ty, and Jake Gyl­len­haal is always a pret­ty com­pelling screen pres­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly in roles where he has a chance to let his freak flag fly. While it seemed unlike­ly a remake could cap­ture the original’s strange blend of earnest­ness and sat­is­fy­ing OTT bru­tal­i­ty, Gyl­len­haal has the sort of wild card ener­gy that’s just crazy enough to pull it off.

The prob­lem with Road House lies chiefly with the new script: a life­less, joke­less dirge from appar­ent first-timers Antho­ny Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry. They trans­port the dra­ma to the Flori­da Keys, which in the­o­ry sounds like a per­fect set­ting for a zany beat-em-up movie, but feels inert and ambigu­ous aside from one croc­o­dile joke (we don’t even get to see the fuck­ing croc­o­dile). There’s no sense of what makes the Keys such a unique and strange place in the Unit­ed States – a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty giv­en the endur­ing lega­cy of the Flori­da Man.

Step­ping in for Swayze is Gyllenhaal’s Elwood Dal­ton, a retired UFC pow­er­house with – you guessed it! – a dark past. He accepts a job at The Road House, owned by tough-talk­ing Frankie (Jes­si­ca Williams) after his car is totalled by a train. The new gig involves keep­ing the patrons in order at her beach­front bar, where local rich boy Ben Brandt (Bil­ly Mag­nussen) is stir­ring up trou­ble in a bid to force Frankie out so he can buy her prop­er­ty and build a lux­u­ry hol­i­day resort (it’s always a lux­u­ry hol­i­day resort!) Like recent Jason Statham vehi­cle The Bee­keep­er, the film posi­tions a young, snot-nosed brat as the vil­lain in a move which is becom­ing de rigueur for stu­dio movies, despite how ​‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’ it feels as a plot device.

Remark­ably, Mag­nussen – once a true delight in Game Night – is upstaged by for­mer UFC fight­er Conor McGre­gor, who makes his act­ing debut as the psy­chot­ic mob fix­er Knox, a coked-up Mas­tiff in human form with an admirable sense of job sat­is­fac­tion. While McGre­gor prob­a­bly didn’t have to do much beyond his exist­ing UFC per­sona and doesn’t seem able to decide if his char­ac­ter is Amer­i­can, Irish, or a secret, third thing, he does ham it up with a refresh­ing com­mit­ment. Gyl­len­haal, usu­al­ly spir­it­ed, seems quite life­less next to him.

Shoe­horned in is a plot about Dalton’s ten­ta­tive romance with local doc­tor Ellie (Daniela Mel­chior) which isn’t giv­en enough screen­time to feel impor­tant and a corny side plot about Dalton’s friend­ship with a local book­store own­er and his pre­co­cious daugh­ter. The only char­ac­ter with any appeal is meek tough guy Moe, played by Arturo Cas­tro with excel­lent comedic delivery.

But no one real­ly comes to a film like Road House for the plot. They watch it for the same rea­son I watch British Lads Hit Each Oth­er With Chair. Per­haps Road House’s ulti­mate crime is the lack of fight­ing – and how much time the char­ac­ters spend not even in the Road House. Why is there an extend­ed Mex­i­can stand­off aboard a yacht? Why do we have mul­ti­ple scenes of Gyl­len­haal hav­ing night ter­rors in his tiny under­pants on his dilap­i­dat­ed house­boat? If you’re going to call your film Road House, I do feel a sol­id 90% of it should take place in the Road House. We have lit­tle sense of the build­ing as a pil­lar of the com­mu­ni­ty, or of the peo­ple who make it what it is. Frankie keeps repeat­ing the bar is impor­tant to her because it belonged to her uncle, but there’s no plau­si­ble expla­na­tion as to why she is pre­pared to pay a man $5000 in cash a week to defend it.

Per­haps I could for­give these flaws if there was any enter­tain­ment val­ue, but Road House’s limp, joke­less dia­logue leaves the view­er plen­ty of time to con­sid­er how lazy the whole affair feels. After quite a fun open­ing scene, the film mean­ders through its gener­ic con­flict and fair­ly unin­spired fight chore­og­ra­phy. Only the film’s final bar fight has any real ener­gy to it, and even then there’s a sense that it could have been more inte­grat­ed into the struc­ture of the Road House itself. Instead, the film­mak­ers opt to just dri­ve a cou­ple of vehi­cles through the build­ing, in a nar­ra­tive move that evokes a six-year-old play­ing with toy cars rather than a mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar film.

It’s a shame too, because I tru­ly believe that Road House had poten­tial. While he can’t pro­vide the same feline cool that came nat­u­ral­ly to Swayze, Gyl­len­haal does a good line in freaky weirdos, but the film seems too cau­tious of alien­at­ing a main­stream audi­ence (pre­sum­ably the same crowd who are drawn to McGre­gor and the UFC’s involve­ment) to take any great swings in script or exe­cu­tion. You’re much bet­ter off with the 1989 orig­i­nal – and maybe a few rewatch­es of British Lads Hit Each Oth­er With Chair.