Review: Road House (2024)

In Doug Liman’s remake of Road House for Amazon MGM Studios, Jake Gyllenhaal takes on the role of the legendary lead bouncer or “cooler,” Dalton, originally portrayed by Patrick Swayze in the 1989 cult film directed by Rowdy Herrington. Liman’s version vacillates between being a good old-fashioned remake, happy to tell its own version of the basic story, and a twenty-first-century legacy reboot, anxious and self-aware, fixated on its predecessor yet trying to distinguish itself. This new Road House neither succeeds at establishing its world and characters on their own terms, nor does it replicate the glories of the original. Still, it’s not without some appeal.

The most appealing aspect of the new Road House is Jake Gyllenhaal’s Dalton. Thankfully, Gyllenhaal is not trying to replicate Swayze’s Dalton, which is one of the smartest choices Gyllenhaal and the filmmakers make. For Swayze’s version is irreplaceable and unrepeatable, a truly original cinematic creation dependent on the paradoxes of the character and the specificity of Swayze’s charisma. What Gyllenhaal does instead is portray Dalton as another version of a character type he has been developing throughout his career, from the cult hit Donnie Darko (2001) through Prisoners (2013), Nightcrawler (2014), and Ambulance (2022), among other works. Although the energy levels of these characters vary, they are always intense loners, yet ones essentially comfortable with being considered weirdos or wackos by those around them.

Here, Gyllenhaal’s brooding sadness as Dalton is modulated with bemused smiles at the events around him and the reactions he elicits from people. The signature Gyllenhaal grin is somewhat jarring when paired with the chiseled, leanly muscular physique he has built up for the picture. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is also a man of sorrow, who contemplates suicide early on but finds some peace among the waves of Florida’s seas. Swayze’s Dalton is a yin and yang of zen peacemaking combined with ferocious animality. Gyllenhaal is more a born fighter with soul, decency, and a deep sadness. Although there are echoes of Swayze’s Dalton, especially with the inclusion of certain lines of dialogue, such echoes are always made something new through Gyllenhaal’s performance.

Indeed, 2024’s Road House is full of narrative and dialogue echoes from 1989’s, but outside of Gyllenhaal’s performance they mostly fall flat. As in the original, characters will joke at Dalton, saying he looks smaller than they expected, or tell Dalton they know who he is, seemingly impressed, but it all feels mechanical, like it’s been added in to check the list of nods to the original that fans expect in a remake.

For instance, take the setting. As we must, given the title, the film depicts another rough-and-tumble roadhouse bar. The setting has been changed, however, from a Missouri town outside Kansas City to the Florida Keys—Glass Key. However, instead of leaning into the particularities that such a setting and its hot, sweaty, tough potential holds for a movie about bar brawls, we get a spacious, gorgeous A-framed venue on a perfect beach called The Road House. Sure, baddies break pool cues and there are bar fights, but this bar seems like Club Med in comparison to “the kind of place that they sweep up the eyeballs after closing,” as Kevin Tighe’s boss describes the Double Deuce in the original.

The supporting cast is composed of many imitations, most of them pale, some to the point of being forgettable. Daniela Melchior’s romantic interest remains just that, a functional role, unlike Kelly Lynch’s Doc, who builds chemistry with Swayze’s Dalton and becomes a developed character. Instead of Tighe’s believable small businessman wanting to clean up his joint, we get a young woman, Frankie (Jessica Williams), who inherited the place and seems only motivated by her family legacy on Glass Key. We don’t really see her efforts as a boss and thus don’t really buy her as a struggling yet competent owner.

Instead of Ben Gazzara’s evil robber-baron, Wesley, (one of the highlights of the original film), we get young Ben Brandt (played by Billy Magnussen), the son of some big boss in jail whom we never see. While we intuit Wesley’s archetypal hold on the small town in the original, in the remake there’s something about Brandt wanting the bar’s land because of a gap in the reefs along the shore and drug smuggling and his dad is a bad guy and blah blah blah. Nevertheless, Magnussen is one of the stronger members of the supporting cast, enjoyable for his exchanges with his henchmen, but he’s never much of a threat to Dalton.

The only real threat to Dalton—and only a physical one at that—is Connor McGregor’s Knox, who struts throughout the movie, from his nude entrance halfway through the movie to his showy exit, with a maniacal grin. McGregor’s first go at acting isn’t good, but at least he is having a ton of fun in the role and so I enjoyed his hitman. Apart from McGregor and Magnussen and a couple of the henchmen and bouncers, however, you don’t get the sense that other members of the cast know what kind of a movie they are remaking. Have they even seen the original Road House? The remake also oddly turns the main henchman, Knox, into the main villain, given Brandt’s ineffectuality. It makes sense in terms of the casting, but it disdains the elegant structures of the original script, which understands the value of having both an archvillain and an acrobatic henchman and in keeping their narrative functions separate.

The new Road House is also sorely missing a key character role, the wise old man, the veteran warrior, the Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sam Elliott’s Wade Garrett plays an important role in the original’s story, serving an archetypal function by instructing the hero while also revealing the limits of their knowledge that the hero must surpass.

It’s strange that the screenwriters, Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, miss these archetypal beats in the remake, given their interest in including self-referential moments of meta humour, mostly through the addition of the red-headed bookstore clerk, Charlie (Hannah Lanier), who is also a vehicle for revealing Dalton’s gentleness. She informs Dalton that he is like one of the lone gunmen of so many westerns, who has drifted into town but will clean things up.

In one scene, the girl jokingly tells Dalton she’s found the story of Dalton’s life, Death at the Double-X Ranch, by Holly Martins, noting the novel’s parallels to Dalton’s apparent scenario. That novel is in fact a fictional novel, being a book referenced in the classic thriller, The Third Man (1949). In that thriller, Joseph Cotton’s pulp novelist protagonist is said to have written that paperback western. The reference is the kind of smart, winking, deep-cut reference that, to me, sums up much of 21st-century pop culture, especially in comparison to earlier Hollywood entertainment, including that of the 1980s. The use of archetypes and tropes today is often done with a knowing recognition and wink at the forms and patterns being used: “See, this is like a western, even though this is a movie about bar bouncers. Get it?” While at the same time, the 21st century rarely gives us genre works that are plainly competent. Unlike the old Road House, the new Road House actually doesn’t work that well as a neo-western, even as it is self-conscious about its aspirational status within that genre. The old one, like it’s very hero, just is.

Before Dalton is conscripted in the remake to clean up the mess on Glass Key, we meet him in one of the movie’s best scenes, its opening introduction, in which Post Malone plays a local mixed martial artist fighter punching jaws in a local dive joint and doing great at it. That is, until his next contender steps into the ring, a mysterious figure who takes off his hoodie and begins to untie his big black boots. The fearsome fighter is shocked and refuses to fight “that guy,” and the mystique of our hero is built up in economic fashion.

Unfortunately, Liman’s use of flashbacks later on dispels much of this mystique. In nightmares on his house boat, Dalton relives his most traumatic memory. In piecemeal fashion, we are eventually shown how, in a televised UFC match, Dalton lost control while fighting a friend and competitor and killed him in his rage. Actually showing this event—especially the fatal blow—does nothing to build up the significance of the event. In a world of instant information and endless scrolls of video, it seems that filmmakers can no longer trust the power of the unseen to establish mystery around and convey the significance of characters and events.

Making Dalton an entertainment and competition fighter also transforms the themes as well, subordinating the concerns about peacemaking and law and justice and making the story more a match of gladiators, one criminal, the other with honour. Yes, it still plays on western tropes, but the overall narrative is not an elegant western story with clear themes. Once again, the film is anxious and scattered, lacking the cool of its central character.

I understand that Liman was angry that the film didn’t play in theatres, but honestly, this film was born for home streaming. It’s the kind of thing people can just throw on and somewhat enjoy. But how many will want to return to it? I’m sure the new Road House will have more of a shelf-life than the direct-to-DVD Road House 2 (a poor work released in 2006, and, as of writing, not available anywhere on streaming). Finishing this review a couple weeks after I first viewed the film, after having taken some time to rewatch portions, I still find it pretty entertaining, but much of the movie, especially its final act, evaporates from memory upon finishing. I expect many viewers will share the same experience.

The lasting significance of Liman’s remake will likely be limited to two points: one, giving us another peculiar, compelling performance by one of our more thoughtful leading men, contributing to his ongoing project of crafting dark loners; and, two, pointing the uninitiated back to the glory of the original Road House.

5 out of 10

Road House (USA, 2024)

Directed by Doug Liman; screenplay by Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles Mondry, based on screenplay by David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkinl; starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Billy Magnussen, Jessica Williams, Joaquim de Almeida, Hannah Lanier, and Conor McGregor.

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