Youth is fleeting and time is short. In my forty-odd years on this planet, one thing has become painfully obvious. We were weird in our past and new generations will find unique ways to be weird too. In the hyper-fast capitalist machine that is entertainment, exploiting eccentricity in order to make by the numbers content has been a time-honored trade. Pushing all the familiar buttons, every studio hopes to get the same flavors from old formulas without understanding how them functions. And you think taking a movie like Road House would at least inspire a filmmaker to be bold and daring.
First of all, what makes director Doug Liman tick? Because of his filmography, none of them have any great standing characteristics besides glitchy-CGI action scenes (of which there is an abundance of here). To wax a bit on my nineties past, this was the man behind Swingers (a movie I never saw until after college) and Go (a movie I, am sad to say, know by heart). What this version of Road House needed was just an ounce of goofy energy that those two films had. Since then, he has done some rather self-serious films and Tom Cruise vehicles.
Which lands us here, Jake Gyllenhaal takes on the character of Dolton. He has a shady past, now a UFC fighter (which is why Conor McGregor gets his debut film role but more on him later). Currently, Dolton enters amateur fights for money. When approached by a bar owner requesting him to be a cooler at her Florida Keys bar, he mulls it over. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by a young girl who runs a local bookstore with her father. She greets him as a Western gunslinger, coming to clean up the town. Which he does, he takes up at the title watering hole (gone is the Double Douce) and begins to whip the staff into shape. But there is more going on than just some barroom hooligans.
I do regret to inform any fans of the original; my knowledge of it only extended secondhand. That was until I viewed it after. And boy, my appreciation was solidified. Don’t get me wrong, this slice of primo eighties cheese is just ok not great. But there is just so much more personality on screen. Patrick Swayze’s charisma just oozes off him like sweat, it’s so natural. Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, has played these stoic loners so many times he is giving Ryan Gosling a run for his money. Seems like Jake can use some Ken-ergy here. Even side characters lack any memorable lines or traits whatsoever. It is enough to make you wonder if the screenwriters just Xeroxed the script’s outline, leaving out any clever dialogue.
Now I must address the McGregor of it all. Yes, there are some other interesting cameos like Post Malone and Jessica Williams. However, our main villain here aspires to what this movie thought it was. Being thrown out of a brothel, walking naked while talking on the phone, seeking clothes and a car; this is our opening impression and still better than anything we have seen so far. And I place him as direct antagonist because; whatever Billy Magnussen’s developer is about, it’s not working. Neither is Daniela Melchior’s doctor/half-baked love interest, shoehorned in here because that was there before. Nothing feels organic.
All and all, Road House 2024 is a shell of a remake with nothing new to contribute. Amazon Prime did the right thing and shelved it to streaming. It had no business being in a theater; sorry, Doug. But if you want something more fun that was, head over to Disney Plus and watch Taylor Swift. There wasn’t going to be a full review of her concert, but it was far more entertaining. But we already knew that, “All Too Well.”
