When Netflix dropped the new ROAD HOUSE remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal, we decided that I’d check it out first, and if, after a half hour or so, it seemed like something Haven would want to see, I’d stop watching and we could view it together.
I did not stop watching.
This overblown, yet somehow also underdone “reimagining” (ha!) features so many head-scratching decisions on the part of the filmmakers that I almost wondered if they’d even SEEN the 1989 original. How do you take a movie that’s so over-the-top that remaking it feels like a quixotic endeavor, and then actually make it LESS ludicrous?? I mean, in the ways that count. Rowdy Herrington’s ‘89 ROAD HOUSE is chock full of cartoony moments, pulpy dialogue, and narrative stretches, but it also feels oddly real in its own context, and there are (amazingly) some relationships that have weight (primarily that between Patrick Swayze’s Dalton and his mentor and friend, Wade Garrett, played with an oozing, playful machismo swagger by Sam Elliott).
Director Doug Liman’s new movie eschews any attempt at creating actual relationships between Dalton (reportedly the SON of Swayze’s character, although it’s never mentioned, probably because the film’s plot runs too parallel to the original to make that detail anything but distracting) and the supporting cast in favor of solitary brooding and bursts of anger (this Dalton is definitely NOT a practitioner of Zen Buddhism). But if the film wanted to amp up the action of the first, why the hell did they make every single fight scene utilizing CGI? This is not a Marvel movie (even if some characters do end up flying through the air and smashing through walls, which, sure, needs to be computer-generated). The absence of any real fight / stunt scenes feels not just like an insult to the diminishing stunt community in film, but it robs the movie of any true bone-crunching heft. As with so many movies that over-utilize this technology, it ends up feeling more like a video game than anything.
In some ways, it reminds me of Rob Zombie’s likewise-ill-advised HALLOWEEN remake… the movie takes everything that made the original a cult classic and supplants it with modern tropes that are instantly forgettable. There’s no “Pain don’t hurt,” there’s no “Be Nice” speech to the bouncers at the not-a-Road House beach bar, there’s no character who fulfills Wade’s role, you never get the sense that the villain carries any true weight in the town, and the romance between Dalton and the doctor feels like a shoehorned afterthought.
As for UFC fighter Conor McGregor’s film debut as the maniacal hired muscle, Knox, it’s a performance that makes the Tasmanian Devil seem low-key. If that’s your bag, then you may dig it, but when someone is so relentlessly one-note, it gets old really fast (and a mid-credits scene featuring McGregor hints at a hopefully-not-realized sequel).
Anyway. This is a lot of words for something so silly. But after discussing the movie the past few days with a few people, it seems as if there are a lot of people who are curious, but skeptical. With reason. Proceed with caution.
* SBIG: So Bad It’s Good
Originally posted on social media, March 31, 2024
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