Road House premieres on Prime Video Thursday, March 21. This review is based on a screening at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Hulk in a Looney Tunes world in Road House, and that’s the main reason to watch this remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle. Gyllenhaal makes the most of his role, and Doug Liman – who has long known how to harvest the power of a leading man, be they Matt Damon or Tom Cruise – maximizes his star's skills to highlight the darkness lurking beneath the charming face and Mr. Rogers attitude of UFC-fighter-turned-bouncer Elwood Dalton.
The original Road House is an action romp with a simple premise: A kind but tough guy gets hired to clean up a roadhouse bar and ends up in a war against a corrupt businessman terrorizing the small town. It is simple, it is silly, it is fun, it is a movie where Swayze’s brawler-with-a-PhD-in-philosophy (really) rips someone’s throat out like he’s performing a Mortal Kombat fatality. To his credit, Liman doesn't try to just do the same thing again, nor does he strip Road House of everything that made it great. Instead, he translates the basic plot and the fun vibes, and adds a seriousness that's an awkward fit with the off-the-wall antics.
This time, our hero is a down-on-his-luck ex-mixed martial artist with a dark past and murderous intent who finds himself thrown into a situation where he has to defend a bar in Key West, Florida from a rich criminal, the corrupt cops on his payroll, and biker gangs. Liman trades the throat-ripping, the advanced degree, the surprise hot-young-Sam-Elliott role, and the bouncer’s "be nice" gospel for a violent, gritty, but always hilarious approach. The sheriff calls himself "Big Dick," a crocodile becomes an unlikely ally, a biker is the sweetest guy you can meet, and real-life UFC champ/subject of a particularly long Wikipedia “controversies” section Conor McGregor enters the picture (and exits it, too) by walking down a busy street fully naked like it's a regular Tuesday afternoon.
Somehow, it works – kind of – and that’s mostly because of McGregor's outlandish villain and Gyllenhaal's play-it-straight approach. Dalton is brooding and angry and you best believe he can rip your throat if he wanted to. And he only barely hides it, living in a world of cartoon characters causing chaos. The character has a serious face until it comes time to punch or slap, which is when he starts cracking jokes and delivering quips like he’s in a Marvel movie. On the other side of the superhero-movie coin, he’s Batman going down to the same level of zaniness as his rogues' gallery, and it functions thanks to Gyllenhaal's charisma alone.
Meanwhile, McGregor steals the show by playing someone so deranged he trades his Ferrari for a driving-school car because he feels like it, then stops the vehicle by ramming into a tree just for the hell of it. The supporting cast isn’t too far behind: Billy Magnussen plays a pathetic loser who thinks he's a Bond villain and Arturo Castro shines in the role of a surprisingly reasonable and nice gang member.
Screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry's most significant update is thematic, shifting the focus of the bouncer-versus-businessman dynamic to be more about class and race – with the cops taking on a bigger role. The problem is that it all falls flat. Their Road House script tries to expand on the many side characters of the original, but just as that starts to get interesting, they’re left behind in favor of the main story. There are some intriguing aspects to the portrayal of a rich white dude and his sheriff’s-department cronies terrorizing a mostly low-income and non-white community. Unfortunately, there's not much commentary to it. Road House never goes deep enough to be poignant – its priorities are the action and the silliness.
Worse yet, the movie just looks ugly as sin. Liman doesn't aspire to John Wick-style operatics, but he does make choices – and most fail miserably. For one, the action tracking feels like it has motion smoothing on, with the moves looking synthetic and unnatural. There's a constant change in camera lens (recalling the whiplash-inducing aspect-ratio shifts of Transformers: The Last Knight) plus what looks like several scenes shot with phones. Any good fight choreography is obscured by insufficient lighting, with awful color correction that changes from shot to shot. (Don't try to track the time of day in any given scene by looking at the sky.)
Worse yet, for a movie built around simple fist fights, much of the combat is computer generated, which should be a crime given how many movies, from big budget to small indies, can craft compelling and thrilling fights better than these. There are also allegations that production was completed with the use of AI during the 2023 actors’ strike. While it remains to be seen whether those allegations are true, what’s painfully obvious is how much of the dialogue is ADR – particularly McGregor's lines, which sound about as bad as the villain in Madame Web. Still, the performances and the goofier tone manage to overcome the visual and narrative issues, and if you're willing to vibe with it, Road House is a fun (but empty) ride.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/road-house-2024-review-jake-gyllenhaal-conor-mcgregor-prime-video