It’s a shame that director Doug Liman decided on a straight-to-steaming release of his reimagining of Patrick Swayze’s 1989 pulpy actioner. The new Road House, starring a smashing Jake Gyllenhaal and a crackling Conor McGregor, is just too big, primal, and entertaining to be enjoyed in all its unhinged glory on the small screen.
It’s a remake we didn’t know we needed. At a time when Hindi cinema is treating originals like regurgitated trash, Road House is a fresh reminder that reimaginings can be wildly fun too, visceral, full of wit and vigor, and knock-out performances; so good that they end up elevating the source material in a way few could conceive possible.
The plot is barebones. It follows Elwood Dalton (Gyllenhaal), a fallen Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) star, living in obscurity winning petty cash for brawls he is too notoriously infamous to fight. One night, the owner of a roadhouse in Glass Keys, Florida, shows up with an offer. She is Frankie (Jessica Williams) and wants Dalton to keep rowdies off her beachside bar. Steeped in depression with nothing better to do, he shows up, setting off a ripple reaction. Dalton soon finds out there’s more to the nightly hooliganism at Frankie’s bar (imaginatively named Road House) than inane drunken scuffles. A local big-shark developer named Brandt (a baby-faced, silly Billy Magnussen) wants to demolish the black-owned, scruffy Road House and build a fancy resort in its place. Single-minded about it, he will stop at nothing. When all else fails, he finally lets Knox (the Irish MMA star Conor McGregor), a gleefully willing, violent bringer of anarchy, take over.
McGregor is a revelation. Too often, even great films suffer at the hands of weak antagonists. But Road House is too gamely and fun to make this mistake. McGregor is so ripped, beast-like, and animalistic in his carnage, that he makes for a wonderfully worthy opponent, basking in his deranged villainy, eager to devour anything and everything that comes his way.
So when he screams death at Dalton, you shiver. His full-blown punches almost always land and do the intended damage. When he beats him to a pulp, it’s so believable, that it hurts. Their showdown towards the end is as satisfying as it is because it is between two solid equals.
But this is a Jake Gyllenhaal romp. Haunted by his troubled past, Dalton uses quiet philosophy and straight-faced sarcasm to mask the inexplicable bestiality that bubbles under his skin, eager to surface if ticked. He is gorgeous, glorious, and grounds this action extravaganza with his trademark humanity.
Road House has some standout bare-knuckled action sequences of the scale and sizzle that can give the best films in this genre a good run for money. And yet, Gyllenhaal manages to punctuate all the madness and the mayhem with pensive moments of quietude.
Written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry (who worked on the adapted screenplay with David Lee Henry, the writer of the 1989 original), Road House is so kinetic and action-heavy, that even at 120 minutes, it doesn’t have enough time or patience to flesh out the backstories of any of its characters, including the protagonist. All we get to know of Dalton is through the erratic flashbacks he sees in his dreams or when people around him allude to the big fight that changed his life.
Whether it be Ellie (Daniela Melchior), the local physician who has an all too brief romantic rendezvous with Dalton, or Charlie (a scene-stealing Hannah Love Lanier), the sagacious teen who runs a roadside bookstore with her father and ends up befriending Dalton, or Frankie, the person responsible for getting him into this thick mess, all arcs brim with incredible unrealised potential. However, Liman chooses to focus on breaking bones, blowing up yachts, and bleeding bodies instead.
You can hardly complain though. I’ve never watched a UFC fight nor am I into gang-bang actioners, but I’ve never had a better time watching brutally bruised men slapping, punching, stabbing, feeding men to crocodiles, double-crossing crooks, and vandalising away to glory. Who knew going bonkers by the sea could be such a riotous party?
