Road House (2024)
★★
No disrespect to Jake Gyllenhaal, but he’s no Patrick Swayze. Let’s be honest, few are. But to step into those shoes appears to be the direct goal of Amazon Studio’s newly-released remake of the 1989 cult classic “Road House.” When it hit the streamer last week, it landed with the great force and immediate fanfare deserving of a much better film, dominating the number one slot on the “Top 10” in popularity tab for eight straight days. It feels like a consolation prize of sorts for a film initially designed for wide theatrical distribution, however by the film’s end you may wonder if it even deserves its ultimately meaningless chart-topping status.
The film follows very closely to its source material. Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former UFC fighter offered the position of bouncer at a Florida Keys roadhouse. The bar is plagued with rowdy customers and unruly clientele, and owner Frankie (Jessica Williams) needs Dalton’s help to clean it up. But it won’t be so easy. Local crime boss Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) runs this town, and his gang of enforcers, led by the ruthless and sadistic Knox (Conor McGregor), aim to take down Dalton, who is meddling in things he ought not to be. Concurrently, Dalton becomes romantically entangled with a doctor (Daniella Melchior) who tends to his injuries. Big action spectacle ensues, as do conspiracies of corruption and deception among powerful figureheads in the town.
If it sounds like we’ve sort of lost the plot here — “I thought it was just a guy cleaning up a bar?” — you’d not be wrong. This was my reaction to the original 1989 film and, suffice to say, the 2024 edition does not remedy this bizarre shift in narrative. In fact, it exaggerates it. Doug Liman’s remake, penned by co-writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, is tediously long and entirely over-indulgent. With even more characters, relationships and minor storylines to crowd its central plot, the film is overbearing in its much-ness, so much so that each element feels drowned and diluted. Dalton’s unlikely friendship with a teenage bookstore owner provides little of value but eats chunks of the runtime. The script also falls into the dangerous trap of underestimating its audience, not trusting them to infer or learn. The film takes effort to blatantly over-explain and over-show things that the audience has already pieced together, and it does so for even the most frustrating minutia. At one point, Dalton goes for a morning walk through the town, and is greeted as a friend by nearly everyone he passes. It would seem he has become accepted into the community; they’re warming to him. It becomes a headache, then, when we are immediately met with dialogue that explicitly tells us that Dalton has been welcomed by the residents of Glass Key. It’s a strange backfiring effect, to over-explain and over-show to such an extreme that it becomes a detriment, and “Road House” is far from the first film to succumb to it.
But the film also struggles with its most fundamental promise of loud, dumb action. Simmering under the surface for nearly ninety minutes, the film finally erupts in a bombastic finale of CGI explosions and muscular hand-to-hand combat, and let’s just say it looks more at home on a laptop screen than your local multiplex IMAX. The visual effects are garish, unconvincing and poorly planned for. A climactic brawl between Dalton and McGregor’s Knox has them stomping around in a digitally-composited puddle of water. Or at least it looks digitally-composited.
It’s honestly hard to tell half the time whether the film looks horrendous for its shoddy VFX touchups or its flat, overexposed cinematography. At times, this sharply digital look is actually quite befitting. The sweltering heat of the tropical Florida Keys is rendered with effective hyperreality, with a particular emphasis on wide-angle photography that gives the whole thing a strangely surreal vibe. It works really well…at times. Most of the time, however, this approach gives the film a typical mid-budget straight-to-streaming sheen that directly contrasts the edge of the 1989 original. And that’s, ultimately, where the problem lies. The original “Road House” had a griminess, a tactile filth. It oozed testosterone and male aggression. This one just doesn’t have that same energy. And it’s fine, admirable even, to take a remake in a fresh direction. But Liman’s film feels directionless.
And if we’re talking lack of direction, we must spend a moment on Conor McGregor, who is doing some unreal work here. I’m not sure who let him in front of the camera, who gave him permission to go as all-out as he goes here, but it was an inspired choice. His uncomfortably misguided performance, as truly terrible and laughable as it is, is the most spectacularly lively thing in the entire film. It was a surprising source of joy to see the real-life UFC fighter routinely make wrong choice after wrong choice, and his consistently outlandish performance will remain one of the most memorable performances of the entire year. Opposite him, Jake Gyllenhaal is fine, no more no less. The script doesn’t provide him ample emotional subtext to give his character layers or dimensions, so Gyllenhaal is stuck delivering middlingly average work as a mostly inexpressive tough-guy.
Mostly inexpressive is, actually, quite an apt way to describe the film overall. It’s tedious and overlong, and expends so much energy trying to make its various elements work only for them all to fall flat. It’s a pale imitation, a half-assed cosplay of “Road House.” It has the rowdy bar and the UFC fighter bouncer, but simply running through similar beats doesn’t win you points where it counts. To remake a classic there must be justification of some sort; a new perspective or angle, an updating of outdated themes or ideas, a new artistic or stylistic approach. Doug Liman’s remake possesses none of these justifications, and if his lazy, ineffective, borderline monotonous film is good for one thing, it’s reminding us how much better we had it with Swayze in ‘89.