The Doug Liman-Directed Road House is a Hoot and a Half! Shame About it Skipping the Theaters, However

In a real change of pace, a remake of a beloved cult film justifies its existence by being good and fun.

When a beloved cult film of the past is remade in the unbearable present the question that is invariably asked is, “Why?” Why would these monsters want to mess with perfection? Why would they want to compete with a movie that people love?

The answer, in the public imagination and also reality, is that studios remake succesful films for overwhelmingly commercial reasons. They do it for the money. After all, it’s much easier to sell the public an idea that they have already embraced in a big way before than try something new and novel that people might hate.

Movielovers feel weirdly protective of their favorite films. The bigger the fan, the deeper the emotional investment. So it’s understandable that a disconcertingly large percentage of the American public seem to view remakes as grievous personal assaults on them and their childhoods.

So when it was announced that Amazon Prime, that storied hub of quality cinema, would be releasing a remake of the Patrick Swayze cult classic Road House, the question was once again, “Why?” Why remake a movie so incontrovertibly rooted in the time and place that created it?

The answer is at least partially rooted in finance. At the risk of being heretical I think that the reason that they wanted to remake Road House is because they had a good script and a charismatic star who is an absolute beast of a man due to some combination of steroids and self-discipline, and, in Doug Liman, the helmer of Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Go, Edge of Tomorrow and Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a better director than the appropriately named Rowdy Harrington, who directed the original.

The final reason to remake Road House is so that tattoo enthusiast and rapper Post Malone can be in it. He was too busy not being alive to appear in the first one. That’s not the case here. Any film with Post Malone is automatically better than one without him. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Also, Road House is a fun cult movie but it’s not Citizen Kane. It’s not Schindler’s List. It’s not Clifford or Freddy Got Fingered. It’s not sacred or sancrosanct. It’s an enjoyable movie about a hunk beating the crap out of people.

Doug Liman’s extremely enjoyable Road House retains that sturdy premise.

Jake Gyllenhaal solidies his standing as an unexpected but inspired action star with a bravura lead performance as Dalton. He’s a professional tough guy and UFC alum who ekes out a living hustling fights.

It’s a macho and lucrative life but also a solitary and lonely existence. Dalton is so overcome with ennui that he decides to kill himself by planting his truck in front of an incoming train, which is pretty damn disrespectul to the poor man or woman driving the train.

Thankfully for the train driver, and Dalton, and the movie as a whole, at the climactic moment when our hero must choose between life and death, between hope and hopelessness, he’s all, “Nah, I guess I’ll live, or whatever.”

The handsome man with the quivering wall of muscles gets an offer from bar owner Frankie (comedian Jessica Williams), he both can and cannot refuse working as the bouncer at an establishment in the Florida Keys called The Road House for five thousand dollars a week

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That’s an awful lot of scratch for a blue collar job like that but he earns his money because The Road House is no typical bar.

It’s more like an open air battlefield where macho assholes drunk on cheap liquor and testosterone throw themselves into full-on battle against other boozed-up degenerates.

It’s a little slice of the Wild West in contemporary Florida. Dalton proves the right man for the job. Gylenhaal brings a Billy Jack quality to Dalton. Like Tom Laughlin’s iconic ass-kicker, or Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, Dalton is the very image of zen calm until it’s time for business. At that point this still, peaceful man is transformed into a hurricane of fists and feet of fury flying in every direction.

Dalton doesn’t need to act like a big shot. He does not need to posture or pose because he’s got the goods. Anyone foolish enough to test him quickly and painfully learns the errors of their ways.

Like a cowboy in an old Western, this buff badass cleans up a lawless town but makes enemies of the powerful people who run and ruin it in the process.

Billy Magnussen is terrific as the primary villain, a child of privilege who wants the Road House shut down so that he and his family can build condos on it. As plots go, that’s not much but Road House is the rare film that might actually be improved if it didn’t have any plot at all rather than one it understandably chooses to ignore at every turn.

Real-life UFC Champion Conor McGregor makes a hell of an impression in his film debut playing Knox, a deranged sociopath and habitual nudist who is a monster of muscles and might like Dalton but firmly on the side of evil rather than good.

McGregor seems like a real piece of shit in real life, just a gross, disgusting, deplorable human being. That makes his casting here as someone we’re supposed to despise so inspired. He’s average sized but so muscular that it feels like his muscles are going to become sentient and flee his cursed body.

Liman and screenwriters Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi find the perfect tone for the material: light, goofy and thoroughly tongue in cheek but not to the point that it leans too hard on camp.

The veteran director knows how to stage and shoot fight scenes cleanly and effectively. He has a tremendous advantage in a Road House set that’s so big that it’s like a universe onto itself.

Road House is a film of seedy surface pleasures that makes the mistake of lasting way too long. There’s no reason they couldn’t wrap up all this silliness and send Dalton on a bus out of town in 90 minutes yet the film lasts well over two hours.

Amazon Prime is frustratingly intent on having the film debut on its streaming service when this is exactly the kind of crowd-pleasing spectacle that should be enjoyed in a packed movie theater full of people who are drunk and/or high and consequently prepared to experience the macho majesty of Road House.

Oh well. Maybe the sequel will get a theatrical release. I guess we’ll just have to see how it fares at the non-box-office.

Three and a half stars out of five