Movie Review
Ripped Jake Gyllenhaal is the best part of stilted Road House remake
Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House.
Within the first five minutes of Road House, Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) “wins” a fight just by showing up and then intimidates another man who has just stabbed him by using just his words. A musclebound man not having to actually be violent is a solid start for the remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie, but as it turns out, it’s also the movie’s high point.
The film, streaming exclusively on Prime Video, doesn’t follow the exact plot of the original movie, but might have been better off if it did. In this version, Dalton is a down-on-his-luck former UFC fighter winning money in underground fights. That’s where Frankie (Jessica Williams) finds him, inviting him to be the bouncer at her road house in the Florida Keys to help control the rowdy clientele.
Dalton does his job a little too well once he arrives, sending a steady stream of toughs to the hospital, where he meets ER doctor Ellie (Daniela Melchior). He soon discovers that the near-constant fighting at the road house is not just people acting out while drunk, but a plot by local entrepreneur Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) to drive the place out of business so he can build a resort on the prime property.
The filmmakers – director Doug Liman and writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry – have the clear intention of trying to make the film into cheesy fun, but they can’t seem to punch their way past just plain bad. Nothing makes sense in the set-up of the movie – why this town is full of aggro men, why multiple different bands continue to play music as the fighting rages, how Frankie can afford $5,000 a week to pay Dalton, and more. The movie moves from scene to scene quickly, so swiftly that it seems that the filmmakers don’t want the audience to think about anything too much.
Pretty much every character who isn’t Dalton comes off as strange, as if there was something in the water in the low-rent town that doesn’t allow them to act in a normal manner. The introductions for the characters are stilted at best, and the dialogue that Bagarozzia and Mondry have them say is just awful, with nothing coming close to being either clever or interesting. The script is so aggressively bad that it’s a wonder that a talented actor like Gyllenhaal would agree to be a part of the film at all.
Of course, the draw for a film like this is not characters talking, but the multiple fights between Dalton and anyone who crosses his path. While a few of them are solid, the random nature of the brawls prevents them from being effective overall. There is also some extraordinarily bad CGI used at certain points, moving characters or objects across the screen at lightning speed in a very distracting manner that offsets any excitement the scenes might otherwise have had.
Gyllenhaal’s ripped body is a special effect of its own, and he makes the most of his scenes despite the eye-rolling lines he’s occasionally required to say. Williams and Magnussen are better actors than they’re given a chance to be here. The inclusion of a non-actor like fighter Conor McGregor (Post Malone also makes a brief appearance) would normally be over-the-top fun, but his performance feels like it belongs it completely different type of movie.
Road House, which often seems to be as much about showcasing a series of random bands as it is about a seemingly invincible bouncer, comes nowhere close to matching the “so bad it’s good” nature of the original film. Instead, it’s just a bunch of quickly-edited scenes designed to give the impression that thrilling stuff is happening, a subterfuge that is easy to see past.
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Road House is now streaming on Prime Video.
