\u201cRoad House\u201d likes to explicitly reference that it thinks it\u2019s a Western. It\u2019s more like a cartoon.<\/p>\n
While that may sound harsh, some of the Looney Tunes-esque qualities of this reimagining of the 1989 Patrick Swayze classic work in its favor. Especially in the first hour, when director Doug Liman and Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles Mondry are setting the table for what\u2019s to come, there\u2019s a fun B-movie throwback aesthetic\u00a0to \u201cRoad House\u201d that clicks for long stretches. However, once this defiantly goofy movie starts to take itself seriously, and asks us too often to do the same, the wheels come off with ridiculous twists, awkward line readings, and some of the worst fight CGI in years. Through it all, Jake Gyllenhaal delivers a fun performance that goes from charming to menacing, but even that gets lost in the chaos of a movie that needed to be sweaty, grounded, and urgent to work but becomes more and more like something you\u2019d watch on Saturday morning. <\/p>\n
When \u201cRoad House\u201d opens, Elwood Dalton (Gyllenhaal) has fallen from grace. We don\u2019t know how, but we know he\u2019s so famous and so physically imposing that he scares combatants (including Post Malone) out of a fight club ring before they even throw a punch. (And credit to Gyllenhaal and his physical trainers for making him entirely believable as a former UFC middleweight.) After a fight that gets canceled before it starts, Dalton is approached by a woman named Frankie (Jessica Williams), who owns a roadhouse in Glass Key, Florida that\u2019s named, of course, Road House. Her establishment has been threatened by local, motorcycle-riding tough guys for weeks and she can barely stay open. She needs a bouncer. She needs Dalton. <\/p>\n
Of course, \u201cRoad House\u201d isn\u2019t just about a bouncer at a bar in the Florida Keys. It turns out there\u2019s a lot more to the violence in Frankie\u2019s bar than the local drunks. A real estate power player named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who inherited an empire from a criminal father, is trying to get Frankie to shut the operation down. Dalton comes in and takes care of Ben\u2019s lackies in a series of scenes that are pretty well-choreographed and conceived. They also set Dalton\u2019s character as the kind of guy who drives his enemies to the hospital after he beats them up. <\/p>\n
At said hospital, Dalton meets a doctor named Ellie (Daniela Melchior), who challenges his alleged altruism\u2014after all, he just clogged up her ER with a bunch of idiots who wouldn\u2019t be there if he wasn\u2019t such a tough guy in the first place. Obviously, Ellie will be the love interest for Dalton, but the film takes forever to get there and then backs away from their relationship almost immediately, turning elements of Ellie\u2019s life into plot twists. It\u2019s understandable that Dalton is hesitant to be happy again given the trauma that\u2019s revealed about his past, but the dynamic between him and Ellie is one of several in this film that feels uncertain of its own purpose. In the \u201880s movies that \u201cRoad House\u201d so desperately wants to be, there\u2019d be actual passion between Dalton and Ellie instead of the tentative stuff that unfolds here more out of narrative necessity. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cRoad House\u201d likes to explicitly reference that it thinks it\u2019s a Western. It\u2019s more like a cartoon. While that may sound harsh, some of the Looney Tunes-esque qualities of this reimagining of the 1989 Patrick Swayze classic work in its favor. Especially in the first hour, when director Doug Liman and Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,37],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}