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Imagine you’re a bouncer at a seedy small-town bar where some of the world’s nastiest drunks attack each other with fists, knives, and broken beer bottles—and that’s on a good night. Forced to risk life and limb by intervening in continuous outbreaks of physical violence, what do you do? A better question: What would Patrick Swayze do? The movie is “Road House,” a 1989 smash hit, trashed by critics and revived by a cult following, and Swayze, as Dalton, the bar’s newly hired cooler, offers a handy crash course in the art of de-escalating tension. “First, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected,” he says. “Two, take him outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless absolutely necessary. And third, be kind.”
Good advice, and until it comes time to rip out an attacker’s throat, Dalton follows it scrupulously. He watches his manners, he doesn’t underestimate (almost) anyone and he goes outdoors like a Zen monk, his oil-covered torso catching the sunlight during Tai Chi practice. But not all of Swayze’s characters are greasy in such a desirable way. In the eerie Reaganite suburbs of “Donnie Darko” (2001), an even darker vision of the 1980s, we find Swayze as Jim Cunningham, a suave motivational speaker with a bad case of soul rot. Instead of self-defense advice, he offers useless self-help platitudes: “Son, violence is a product of fear. Learn to truly love yourself.” No wonder he’s so satisfying when troubled young Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) steps up to the microphone and lets this charlatan speak: “I think you’re the fucking Antichrist.”
The confrontation ends almost before it begins, but watching it again recently I couldn’t help but imagine what would have happened if the two had come to blows. In a fight between Donnie Darko and Dirty Dancer, who would win? Swayze had already left behind the action-movie glories of “Road House” and “Point Break” (1991), but could he have prevailed based solely on his golden-god physique? Or would the young Gyllenhaal, beneath the baby fat and gangly smile, have revealed some of the vengeful fighting spirit he would later display in the frenetic boxing drama “Southpaw” (2015)?
The energetic but dark remake of “Road House,” directed by Doug Liman, is not the film that will resolve the issue, much less inspire new ones. The film passes from memory as quickly as it passes across the screen. But there is poignancy in seeing Gyllenhaal, now forty-three and broken as hell, paying tribute to his late former screen partner. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is not a goalie by trade. He had been an Ultimate Fighting Championship star until he snapped and beat an opponent to a pulp, a trauma that ended his career and still haunts his dreams. He now lives in his car and tries to make money by signing up for independent fights. But even the toughest opponents (including one played by Austin Post, aka rapper Post Malone) tend to give up out of fear.
It is in one of these aborted fights that Dalton catches the attention of Frankie (Jessica Williams), who offers him a job cooling down the riff-raff at his roadside bar in the Florida Keys. After briefly weighing her options, including suicide, Dalton agrees. But why? Want to visit Ernest Hemingway’s house or see the bridge he blew up in “True Lies” (1994)? He may realize that he still has some fight left in him; On the other hand, he may think that his wish to die could still be fulfilled. In any case, Gyllenhaal is a skilled enough actor to keep you guessing. His Eagle Scout’s sincere smile has always possessed a lively touch of madness; You’ll even find traces of it in his good-guy roles, in “Zodiac” (2007) and “Prisoners” (2013), where his characters’ dogged pursuit of justice tips too easily toward obsession. A little of this ferocity goes a long way: witness his most outlandish and lurid turn, in the unhinged media satire “Nightcrawler” (2014). Here, his undercurrent of menace works very well; It’s just the thing to pleasantly unbalance an otherwise formulaic adventure. In that sense, “Road House” is very much in his wheelhouse.
The first “Road House” was directed by Rowdy Herrington, presumably because Stompy McFisticuffs was not available. Released in theaters in May 1989, the film was somewhat lost during a summer that brought us “Batman,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Lethal Weapon 2,” “Ghostbusters II,” “The Abyss,” and “ License to kill”. Turn on “Road House” again thirty-five years later, however, and you’re in for a jukebox explosion of trashy delights, along with a chilling reminder of what Hollywood action movies used to be like. The meat comes in two forms, seductively photographed and brutally pulverized. The idiotic plot is presented with an impressively serious face: night after night, fight after fight, the bar becomes ground zero in a battle for the soul of a small town. On one side are a scheming tycoon and his team of ugly regulators. On the other side are Dalton, his bouncer, a sexy doctor, some salt-of-the-earth grunts, and a drawling Sam Elliott, who proves to be Dalton’s equal, and perhaps even superior, in painting-worthy neatness. up.
The remake’s writers, Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, stick to the narrative model of the first film, as if signaling a return to B-movie basics. The hope is that you’ll laugh more in recognition than derision when a doctor (Daniela Melchior) provides Dalton with more than just strict medical care, or when the film’s highly crushable rich boy villain (Billy Magnussen) rides around on a yacht. A much more formidable figure is hitman Knox, an aptly named fortress who, played by professional wrestler Conor McGregor, makes his way through the proceedings like a wrecking ball with an Irish accent. McGregor’s extravagant line readings may be as painful to endure as his punches, but he has wild-eyed energy to burn, and he makes an incredible entrance, striding through an open market without a single article of clothing or a hint of shame. . It’s a good sight gag, even as it betrays a certain self-consciousness in the film: it’s telling that the one instance of nudity is played not for titillation but for laughs.
Everyone else remains mostly covered up, despite frequent shots of Gyllenhaal’s severed and battered torso. “Road House” itself often feels trapped, suspended uncomfortably between a modern genre presentation and an ironic homage to ’80s films. Understandably, the writers have thrown out some of the original’s less enjoyable lines (“I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”), and added a little snap to the material, mostly courtesy of a hungry crocodile. Less successfully, they have coated the dialogue with a modern sheen of self-awareness: hence the friendly bookstore worker (Hannah Lanier) who compares Dalton, rather hopefully, to a character in a western movie. Which Westerner exactly? “The man who crashed his 4×4 into Liberty Valance”?
In an unsurprising concession to our age of instant gratification, Gyllenhaal’s Dalton starts hurting people long before his predecessor. However, he still tries hard to be nice and it’s funny when he takes a group of troublemakers outside, teaches them all a well-deserved lesson, and then takes them to the hospital. They’re lucky, at least for now. Wounds that no doctor can treat are still to come, some of them inflicted by ships and others by bombs. (Both “Road House” films bear the stamp of veteran producer Joel Silver, for whom fiery explosions are a gratifying necessity.) You can see why the violence, which alternates between intimate, close-range stabbings and Looney Tunes-level absurdity, should have appealed to Liman, who has proven himself to be a smart, versatile action director, in films as diverse as “The Bourne Affair” (2002) and “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014). He wisely films the bar fights in mostly long, uninterrupted takes, moving the camera in sync with the actors and cutting more for clarity than sensation. But such continuity of motion has a way of ruining the very illusion of it, exposing digital seams and artificial bumps that have clearly been applied in post-production.
It may be that the flaws of The Uncanny Valley are more evident on the big screen. If so, most viewers will never see them, due to some behind-the-scenes butting heads that are almost as outlandish as the on-screen hand-to-hand combat. It’s a measure of Hollywood’s new economy that, despite premiering earlier this month to a raucous, appreciative audience at the SXSW film festival, “Road House” is bypassing theaters altogether and streaming straight to the queue from Amazon Prime Video. Liman has protested the decision, and it’s hard not to empathize. “Road House” is far from a great movie, but the pleasures it generates, novel or nostalgic, brawny or sparse, are surely best experienced (and possibly even magnified) in the company of a crowd. ♦
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