Like much else about 1989's Road House, it sounds implausible. But yes, it's true: after becoming the world's pin-up via Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze really did sign on to play a hard-brawling bouncer in a down-and-dirty, hard R-rated actioner that featured an abundance of boobs, admiring glances at the Swayzeian derriere, and a fellow being crushed by a stuffed polar bear. Within two years, Swayze would be signing up for the elevated genre fare of Point Break, a film critics were meant to go wild for (action plus subtexts plus a director clearly going places). But there was nothing elevated about Road House: here, in all its neon-lit, beer-soaked glory, was the kind of crash-bang-wallop, mind-in-the-gutter B-movie studios like MGM once had both the resources and inclination to toss out as a bone to the Saturday night and home rental crowds. The remake our new germaphobic overlords at Amazon have just issued is, by contrast, 15 rated and decidedly wipe-clean, its aspiration towards relative respectability signalled first and foremost by the architecture of its primary location, being part tiki bar, part Anglican cathedral. (For UK readers: think seafront Wetherspoons.) New Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) comes complete with one of those backstories they have nowadays: he's a former MMA fighter with non-committal suicidal tendencies, such that he's taken to parking the car he's been sleeping in on level crossings in the hope fate will intervene. Yet the world he passes into, upon assuming his post on a scenic strip of the Florida Keys, is again recognisably that of the Western. Bad guys come to town, looking to tear down the road house as Lee van Cleef's men once tried to torch saloons; Dalton duffs them up; and then, having duffed the bad guys up, Dalton rides off into the sunset. The guarantee Amazon appends to that happy ending is that this is the first Road House that won't leave you needing a long, hot, possibly chemical shower afterwards. This does not, however, speak to the more complicated matter of whether Road House '24 is really any good.
I suspect it will depend on how your expectations were shaped by the original. If you venture this way anticipating something comparably wild, you will be disappointed. (The nudity is the first thing tossed out the door.) You will be happier if you're just hunting functional meat-and-potatoes fodder, something to stick on of an evening because it's at the top of the menu and you can't be arsed scrolling: it's Road House as gastropub, a film in which there are jokes about calling your road house 'The Road House' and houseboat 'The Boat'. (This latter is where Dalton sporadically retreats to have visions of where his erstwhile career went awry - or "fucking boat dreams", as he labels them.) The highest praise one can bestow upon this Road House is that it never remotely looks like a film intended to go straight-to-streaming. (For that call, we have Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to, erm, thank.) As recently as 2017's American Made, director Doug Liman demonstrated he knows how to fill a frame with interesting spaces and faces. Here, in a notably more expansive take on Dalton lore, he offers Joel Silver-bought yachts and boats cruising over crystalline blue waters, because this is apparently now Road House on the high seas; and more of that intensely close-up, hand-to-hand physical combat that was a feature of Liman's The Bourne Identity, only now with POV camera flourishes, computer-enhanced editing trickery and a ZZ Top tribute band twanging their guitars in the background. Again, it's all been conspicuously cleaned up and watered down: the film remains discreet in its gore, even when one goon is set upon by a crocodile, and it feels heavily ironic - given the film's status as An Amazon Studios Production - that Dalton should now split his time evenly between the road house and protecting a local family-run bookstore, perhaps motivated by an early script reference to Ernest Hemingway. ('The Road House' is just spacious enough to conceal one of those Prime click-and-collect lockers in the back.)
Yet at its best, when it's really pumped and going for it, Liman's Road House reminded me of those preposterously entertaining, much-rewritten studio blockbusters initiated by the likes of Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer back in the 1990s. More so than the often haphazard original, this one knows exactly what it's peddling, and the sense of humour with which it does so suggests at least a handful of the gathered creatives understood what made those earlier movies such fun to watch. Gyllenhaal's goofier, gabbier Dalton sidles casually into conversation with his adversaries: these include a goon who admits he only got into thuggery because he really liked motorbikes and wanted to be in a gang, Joaquin de Almeida as a corrupt sheriff who insists on being called Big Dick, the amusingly wormy Billy Magnusson in what was once the Ben Gazzara role, and your actual Conor McGregor as the latter's wholly understandable weapon of choice. McGregor is handed an introduction any Bollywood hero or villain would kill for - if they had the balls to try - before somehow cornering Dalton within the confines of a motorised dinghy. "Lookie here, our own little Octagon," the brute sneers, cracking his knuckles. "Who taught you shapes?," is Dalton's response. There may not be a funnier exchange in either Road House, nor in any movie released this side of Con Air; the surprise is finding something so precisely, nay, so exquisitely worded tucked away in a movie that is otherwise so big and dumb. (Maybe all that time in the bookstore paid off.) Elsewhere, corporate lassitude holds sway. If the earlier film gave us a dive bar, this is plainly more of a hangout spot, inviting local covers and blues bands and actors of varying calibres to a sunkissed beach so as to let the alcohol flow and the notional good times roll. (Two drink maximum, as per the HR memo.) The '89 Road House, also conveniently streamable on Prime Video, remains a night that keeps threatening to get entirely out of hand. Liman's film is more like witnessing a starrily appointed, scrupulously surveilled launch party for a new line of flavoured vodkas. There is a certain fascination and enjoyment involved - and it's obviously easier to gawp when the event is being pumped directly into your living room. Yet with a simplicity not untypical of the general Road House experience, it may finally all boil down to this: whatever else he is, Lukas Gage is no Sam Elliott.
Road House is now streaming via Prime Video.
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