The original 1989 action romp Road House starred Patrick Swayze as a bouncer who saves an insalubrious club from its rowdy clientele. Twenty-five years on, it’s damning him with faint praise to say that Jake Gyllenhaal is the best thing in this otherwise risible, waste-of-time reboot.
A bulked-up Gyllenhaal is back to the fighting weight he was in 2015 boxing movie Southpaw as Dalton, a former UFC fighter with a dark past who’s the archetypal taciturn stranger in a small town beleaguered by thugs. Frankie (Jessica Williams), the owner of the titular drinking establishment, offers Dalton a job with the line, “I own a road house. Hemingway used to drink there.” After the self-destructive Dalton wins a game of chicken with a freight train, he agrees to start life over in the Florida Keys beachside town.
This Road House may be billed as a “reinterpretation” rather than a remake, but the superficial 1980s spirit is intact with characters so broad and a script so basic it feels like a Saturday Night Live parody.
Among the supporting characters, streetwise nurse Ellie (Daniela Melchior, Fast X) has a dead mother, an estranged father and a chip on her shoulder; Billy Magnusson’s baddie Brant is a rich kid, wannabe gangster with daddy issues. Meanwhile, violent nice guy Dalton has traumatising flashback dreams by night and sports an enigmatic perma-smile by day.
For a split second Road House seems like it might get exciting when mild-mannered Dalton gets a gang of marauding hoodlums out into the car park where he asks them courteously, “Do you have medical insurance?” before beating them to a pulp … and then driving them to the hospital for treatment.
But that’s a “best bit” that is never repeated in a story that pads out a two-hour running time with one-dimensional acting, verbal diarrhoea and a laughable acting debut by Irish champion MMA fighter Conor McGregor. As Dalton’s main rival, he mainly gives the B-movie dialogue a kick in the head.
Only Brant’s daft sidekick, played by Arturo Castro from Broad City, provides much-needed comic relief.
The thing about Swayze is we were watching a talented dirty dancer show he could also (pretend to) kick the living daylights out of someone.
Gyllenhaal, for all his range and acclaim (remember Brokeback Mountain, Nightcrawler, Donnie Darko?), might save the Road House but he cannot save this movie.
Rating our of 5: ★★
Road House directed by Doug Liman is streaming now on Prime Video.
