Movie review «Road House»

On March 21, Prime Video released the action film «Road House» directed by Doug Liman, whose filmography includes such popular action films as «The Bourne Identity», «Mr. & Mrs. Smith» and the sci-fi blockbuster «Edge of Tomorrow. This is a remake of the same name movie starring Patrick Swayze, which was released in 1989. In the review below, we tell you what the new variation of the old story offers.

«Road House»

Genre action movie
Director Doug Lyman
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor, Billy Magnussen, Jessica Williams, Post Malone
Premiere Prime Video
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb

After the invincible underground fighting star Carter Ford sees his next opponent in the opposite corner of the ring, he immediately gets angry and refuses to give up his money. The reason for the sudden emergence of the guy’s instinct for self-preservation is the dubious prospect of meeting face-to-face with former UFC professional fighter Elwood Dalton, who simply takes the cash and walks away.

Outside, the hero is approached by a young woman who offers Dalton a job as a bouncer at her Florida Keys coastal bar, which is constantly attacked by local bikers. After taping up the stab wound he received from a foe, the man politely declines the offer and is about to throw himself in front of a train, but something stops him at the last minute. Elwood decides to help the suffering businesswoman, but later realizes that he has encountered someone more dangerous than a bunch of frantic drunkards on iron horses.

The new film expectedly abandons the features of a long-gone era that would be considered bad taste today. Thus, in the 1989 film, almost in the very first shot, the camera focuses on slender female legs, not to mention the subsequent nudity of the beauties. In the remake, you can count on Conor McGregor’s buttocks at most, although the movie is supposed to be a male movie, so the creators could have done without this erotic performance.

In addition, Doug Liman and screenwriters Chuck Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi decided to diversify the continuous fights with scenes on the water, to add dynamics and humor, and to add a dramatic background to the protagonist’s biography, which is poor in details. All these changes were clearly beneficial and made us forget that sometimes strange and stupid things happen on the screen. A scene from somewhere in the horror movie «Lake Placid», which comes out of the blue.However, just like 35 years ago, action films are valued not for their vital dialogues or coherent plot, but for the tangible principle of the conflict, when the viewer willingly roots for the good side, and above all for the staging of the battle scenes. Here, there are no particular problems with this. The camera actively dances around the brutal brawlers, the sounds of blows to the jaw are heard with the frequency of almost machine-gun fire, and Conor McGregor irritably scowls at the lens.

Interestingly, the old «Road House» shamelessly used the classic western story arc, when the protagonist arrives in a small town, completely rotten and sunk in lawlessness, under the control of a gang led by a vile villain. The protagonist gains the strength to challenge the villain, and at the same time to conquer the first beauty in the village, with whom he will triumphantly walk towards the sunset.

The remake delicately pokes fun at this factor: one of the characters says outright that Dalton’s story sounds like the plot of a Western, and there’s even a place for a typical corrupt sheriff. Obviously, a set of archetypal characters and a lack of interesting plot twists are not the factors that make people watch. For example, a girl and her father who own a bookstore exist purely as function characters, so their storyline is painfully predictable. But in the process, you’re unlikely to have a great desire to pay attention to it because there’s so much healthy and unhealthy idiocy, and most importantly, action. The movie succeeds in entertaining.

Jake Gyllenhaal, hardened by his experience in the fight scenes of Antoine Fuqua’s boxing drama «Southpaw», looks gorgeous as a tough fighter with a heavy burden of guilt on his heart. McGregor seems to have decided that he is on the set of the action movie «Crank», so he teeters on the edge of looking like a tattooed monkey and a killing machine. While the former is a complete cringe, the latter, not surprisingly, is performed with great confidence. The role of the bar owner went to Jessica Williams, who you may have seen in last year’s dramedy «Shrinking» and a cameo by the popular singer Post Malone. By the way, after the screening, I kept thinking that if Patrick Swayze were still with us, he could have appeared in a cameo role and played the imprisoned father of the antagonist, who was never shown to us.