Fiction, anecdotes, and storytelling in general have long informed the many values within a society, but the flawed nature of the human mind constantly subjects those lessons to distortion, and with every new mind that gets involved, it can get to the point where the end result can be completely different from what it began as. And, even if that result isn’t a downgrade, this distortion can’t be ignored.
Road House, Prime Video’s latest original film and a reimagining of the Patrick Swayze-led 1989 movie of the same name, aggressively captures the spirit of that observation, because no matter your stance on Road House (a film whose strengths and weaknesses effectively cancel each other out, with a slight edge in favor of the strengths), there’s no denying the shadow casted by the film’s most pervasive issue, which can be neatly summed up with a simple question; why is this a remake?
Indeed, at no point has Road House been particularly shy about just how different it is from the 1989 film on a textual level – swapping out Dalton’s bouncer background for a UFC one, a major scenic divergence in Florida from the original’s Missouri, and just about everything else – but by marking itself as a remake or reimagining of the 1989 film, it sets the expectation that it will at least revisit the thematic spirit of the original, but Road House shows little to no interest in doing that.
That’s not to say that Road House was necessarily obliged to reexamine the original film’s ideas (although, given the original’s unrealized mileage, the lack of Road House‘s doing so is still cause for some disappointment), but it nevertheless raises the question of why Road House associated itself with the 1989 film at all; when you change things up as much as Road House does, it makes more sense to just make a whole new film at that point. Road House in its entirety, then, makes that question of “why” an entirely unavoidable one when it didn’t have to, and there’s something somewhat insincere about that.
In any case, as an entirely original movie, Road House is solid entertainment with consistent-enough execution to make you feel like it was two hours well killed (“killed,” in this case, being the less-lucrative colleague of “spent”); at the very least, you’ll close Prime Video with all of your brain cells intact after watching the highs marginally outplay the lows, and that’s worth something.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as former UFC fighter Elwood Dalton, who gets recruited as a bouncer by a Florida Keys roadhouse called the Road House—a joke that, sadly, is indicative of Road House‘s grasp on comedy as a whole. There, his stoic presence is welcomed by everyone except the rich Brandt family, who use everything at their disposal, from corrupt police sheriffs to off-the-chain fixer Knox (Conor McGregor) to run Dalton out of town and the Road House into the ground.
Unsurprisingly as ever, Gyllenhaal is in top form as Dalton, moving through the rugged, humid backdrop of the Glass Keys with an amusingly mythological air; the protagonist is entirely a product of himself amongst a sea of characters who, by contrast, are spiritually shackled to the history and infrastructure of the Sunshine State, and the way Gyllenhaal carries this musclebound sage suggests that, on some level, Dalton is aware of this. How else could he so successfully merge kind-hearted cheekiness with raw blink-and-you’ll-miss-it murder?
McGregor’s Knox, meanwhile, is a human cluster bomb of Dalton’s worst nightmare; if Dalton were a monster, he would be Knox, and the feral mercuriality that first-time actor McGregor brings makes him almost as watchable as Gyllenhaal. It’s a shame that Knox wasn’t given more to do (even then, it’s hardly the biggest problem with the plot), but the real-life former UFC fighter deserves a tip of the hat for stepping into this cinematic ring as confidently and successfully as he does here.
While Dalton and Knox are both very strong, the same can’t be said about Road House‘s writing. For a film whose protagonist tends to find humor in things, most of Road House‘s attempts at chuckles (and there are plenty) are too self-serving and contextually dissonant to be any good. The dialogue, meanwhile, falls at a few too many hurdles (subtlety, purpose, excruciating attempts at being meta, you name it), to be anything more than a non-fatal but still detrimental burden to the film’s more serviceable-to-great aspects.
One such aspect is the plot, which is precisely what you’d expect from a pulpy action thriller, and frankly, that’s absolutely for the best; a flat plot, after all, is better than an unnecessarily messy one, and, in this case, a flat plot is also a plot that won’t distract from the film’s action set pieces, which Liman and cinematographer Henry Braham craft with commendable success. The fight choreography is great when it’s great, and even when it’s not, the uncooked punchiness of it all still delivers, albeit in a very peculiar manner that might not appeal to everyone. Ultimately, when Liman clearly has an idea for how he wants a scene to go, the result is pretty awesome; if only he had a couple more of those ideas, then maybe Road House would have truly stood out in a big way.
But, it doesn’t, though that’s still mostly okay; Road House, at the end of the day, is a welcome, unceremoniously dynamic addition to the action thriller library, with a pair of fantastic performances outweighing lazy dialogue and a plot that gives space for the stunt workers to take center stage, even if said space wasn’t used up quite as completely as Road House would have preferred.
It’s a narrow victory that’s counteracted by the fact that it seemingly just called itself a Road House remake for the sake of calling itself a Road House remake, and that subsequently muddles the Road House identity as a whole; with two vastly different movies now sharing the mantle, what might the best version of a Road House movie even be?
But, so long as you can mentally make quick work of that little discordance (and you should, as that’s a question for another arena entirely), Road House is anything but a waste of time.
