'Road House' 2024 Is Marginally Less-Silly Than 'Road House' 1989
The original is true, accidental camp, whereas the remake is much more self-aware.
1989’s Road House is a true camp classic: it’s wildly entertaining, but probably not in the way its filmmakers intended it to be.
Directed by Rowdy Herrington (Striking Distance) and starring the late, great Patrick Swayze, the film is set in a bizarre alternate reality where bar bouncers are celebrities. One of the profession’s most elite and revered practitioners, James Dalton (Swayze), is hired to help clean up the titular Missouri establishment. Dalton, a philosophy student (!) whose guiding principle is “be nice until it’s time to not be nice,” is haunted by having once killed a man in self-defense by ripping the guy’s throat out with his bare hands - but not so haunted that he can’t still fall in love with a local ER doctor, Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch). Alas, he also runs afoul of the town’s crime boss, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara, in the role for which he surely hoped he’d be remembered), who proceeds to make Dalton’s life mildly annoying by messing with local businesses that aren’t the bar at which Dalton works and to which Dalton has a tangential relationship at best. Things take a turn for the worse when Dalton gets into a scuffle with Wesley’s #1 thug (Marshall Teague), resulting in another death by throat rip (famously parodied in MacGruber).
Understandably, Elizabeth finds it upsetting to see a guy she’s been sleeping with tear out another man’s trachea. Still, after Wesley murders Dalton’s best friend, mentor, and fellow inexplicably famous security guard, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), Dalton goes on a killing spree. He ultimately shows enough restraint not to rip out Wesley’s throat, which is enough of an arc to win back Elizabeth. Then the townspeople get together and murder Wesley themselves. In the final scene, we see the bar thriving while Dalton and Elizabeth skinny-dip.
The new (and already controversial) remake of Road House was directed by Doug Liman (Go, The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow, etc.) and features Swayze’s Donnie Darko co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal, as Dalton (now renamed Edwin - I kept waiting for a reveal that he’s meant to be James’ nephew or something, but that never happens). This version of Road House tells more or less the exact same story, while trying to iron over some of the earlier movie’s wrinkles, but it’s ultimately just as silly… albeit more knowingly so: it feels a bit like it was written by Shane Black, an icon of post-modern action cinema (which isn’t surprising, given that the new screenplay is partially credited to Anthony Bagarozzi, who collaborated with Black on 2016’s The Nice Guys). Whether Road House 2024’s self-awareness is a good thing or a bad thing when compared to Road House 1989’s earnestness is a debate for history to decide, but I’d say the final result is only slightly-less entertaining than its predecessor.
This version of Dalton is a former UFC fighter, which helps explain why people recognize him without asking us to believe that bouncers can be as famous as movie stars. He’s haunted by the memory of having killed a man in the ring. The owner of the new road house, which is in the Florida Keys instead of Missouri, is portrayed too-briefly by the wonderful Jessica Williams (Booksmart). She finds him grifting not-exactly-professional MMA fights by getting his opponents (including Post Malone) to put up wagers before they learn who he is - so he never actually has to fight, because would-be combatants skip out on the fisticuffs the moment they realize that they’ve been pitted against a pro. He’s suicidally depressed, which somehow leads him to accept the gig.
The new iteration of Dalton never gives a version of the “be nice” speech, but the doctrine remains a part of his character, which Gyllenhaal plays with a laid-back demeanor and perpetual goofy grin, like he just polished off a joint right before Liman called “action.” Swayze’s Dalton was polite-yet-firm with troublemakers; Gyllenhaal’s Dalton goes so far as to drive them to the local emergency room after he’s done fucking them up. He’s actually closer, in both age and demeanor, to Sam Elliott’s character than Patrick Swayze’s.
Speaking of Sam Elliott: there’s no equivalent to his role, which makes sense, because you wouldn’t buy Dalton as a dude who almost kills himself if he had friends and a support system and all that stuff. But there is still an ER doctor love interest, now named Ellie (Daniela Melchior from The Suicide Squad). Dalton has just much palpable chemistry with Williams’ character as he does with Ellie, but Williams is only nine years younger than Gyllenhaal, whereas Melchior is 16 years his junior, so she’s obviously the more appropriate romantic partner.
Liman half-heartedly tries to make Ellie a little more interesting than her forebearer: in the original, her connection is to the story is that her uncle owns one of the local businesses being harassed by the villain, who also happens to have a thing for her, but here, her father is a crooked sheriff (career heavy Joaquim de Almeida) who works for the bad guy. In theory, this might have led to letting her inhabit more ethically-unstable ground, thereby making her a more three-dimensional character; in practice, it’s just a plot device with which the filmmakers actually do very little. She does get to throw a few punches of her own this time out, though, so that’s something.
As for this movie’s big bad, he’s a trust fund baby and real estate developer named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who wants to tear down the bar so he can build a resort. The muscle this time out is Knox (authentic UFC champion Conor McGregor), and he’s actually dispatched by Brandt’s father, who is running things from prison and rightfully believes his son to be an incompetent ninny. Making Brandt a wealthy real estate guy with criminal tendencies and serious daddy issues may have been intended to conjure thoughts of a certain aspiring-despot, but it’s not as though the movie actually has anything to say about said broke-ass dipshit.
McGregor, meanwhile, almost literally comes in from a different, far more cartoonish movie: when we first meet him, he’s walking around Italy buck naked after being caught sleeping with a married woman, and he nabs new clothes by walking into a busy square and assaulting someone. Knox is prone to truly dumb ‘80s-style action movie puns (e.g., “It’s been a long time since I’ve been clubbing” before causing destruction with a golf club), and McGregor plays him with a spring in his step and a continuous psychopathic grin. He seems to be having fun chewing the scenery, but he’s a truly terrible actor who I assume is in the movie because a) it helped the producers get UFC to participate with the production and b) it makes Gyllenhaal seem tough to go toe-to-toe with this dude who in real life would probably put in him a coma faster than you can say “Remember Bubble Boy?”. I couldn’t help but think what Jason Momoa, who was so delightfully preposterous as the villain in last year’s Fast X, might have done with the role.
Road House 2.0 also adds a precocious, outgoing moppet (Hannah Lanier) whose dad owns one of the soon-to-be terrorized local businesses, so as to give Dalton a greater emotional stake in any events that don’t directly pertain to the bar. Except it doesn’t even really make sense that Brandt’s guys would go after any business but the bar - in the original, Wesley wants every local shop to pay him protection money, but here, Brandt only needs to take control of the bar to construct his resort. I’d wager they left in the whole subplot about adjacent businesses becoming collateral damage to make Brandt seem more hateable and Dalton more heroic, but given that no one watches Road House to see Gyllenhaal converse with the actress who will probably be playing his love interest in ten years, they might as well have cut this whole part of the story out.
The wisest change Liman makes to the original movie is to fix at least some of its objectively wonky structure: whereas Road House ‘89 separates Dalton’s final showdown with the primary henchman and the end-of-level boss by 30 minutes, here, the two final confrontations are amalgamated into a single grand finale. Without giving anything away, he also fits the narrative with a more thematically-appropriate, arguably more “realistic” conclusion.
And yet the new Road House, like the old Road House, still drags a little before finally coming to its big finale, which I think is because it has structural issues of its own. It’s hard to delve into those issues without spoilers, but what both films have in common is a sense that they’re just spinning their wheels in the middle. Dalton’s beef with the baddies intensifies more gradually (Knox doesn’t even show up until about halfway through the story), but just as stupidly; the motivation for Dalton and Knox not to kill one another during their first fight, for example, is truly nonsensical. It would have been worth sacrificing the film’s weak stabs at emotion for fewer head-scratching plot developments and a shorter runtime.
Still, Road House 2024 is fun more frequently than it’s not. Liman, it goes without saying, knows how to direct an action scene; he often puts the viewer at eye level right beside Dalton, giving the fights a solid mix of contemporary slickness and brutality. And no spoilers, but at the 48 minute mark, the film has what is truly one of the funniest dei ex machina I’ve ever seen. Plus, it’s on Prime Video, which you’re likely already paying for, so if you have nothing else to do, you might as well watch it. At this point in history, that’s praise worthy of a pull quote!