In many ways, director Doug Liman’s re-imagining of the 1980s cult hit Road House can be seen as a companion piece (and low-key rebuttal) to the many machismo-drenched Indian action movies that we’ve recently seethed at. At one point in the first act, the hyper-violent protagonist’s love interest, a doctor, declares that she’s fed up with rage-filled maniacs clogging up her ER room after nightly brawls. And towards the end, a chirpy child assures him that while he isn’t the hero of this story, he most certainly isn’t the villain either.
Played by Jake Gyllenhall, Elwood Dalton is what our Bollywood stars would describe as a ‘grey character’. He uses violence as an answer to pretty much every problem, and God knows he seems to walk into them. When we first meet him, Dalton is killing time by participating in some kind of underground fight league; this opening scene exists more or less to establish how formidable he is. A brawler played by Post Malone of all people practically pees himself at the thought of taking him on in a ring.
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But Dalton is also a man with a dark past, which we learn about in due course of time. He lives out of a suitcase, isn’t tied down to a place or people, and gladly accepts an offer to move down to the Florida Keys and work as a bouncer at a beachside bar prone to attracting the worst kind of criminals every night. This — being approached by a woman and not resisting her offer — instantly separates the new Road House from the Patrick Swayze original, which, in all honesty, remains ridiculously unwatchable despite what its cult of fans might tell you. In that movie, Swayze’s character was openly dismissive of the gig, which was offered to him not by a pretty young Black woman but by a middle-aged white man.
It doesn’t take too long for Dalton to get into his first fistfight with the local hoodlums, whom he dispatches without breaking a sweat, and then drives down to the hospital himself. This is where he meets cute with Ellie, played by Daniela Melchior. The new Road House is very charming in these early scenes, as Dalton forges reluctant friendships with the town oddballs, establishes his suave savagery, and essentially compels you to lean in closer. But something shifts after the first act, when the movie introduces its primary antagonist, a hot-headed real-estate tycoon played by Billy Magnussen like a coked-up Ajit.
This character, Ben Brandt, has designs on the patch of land upon which the road house rests — he wants to redevelop the entire coastline. But after learning how easily Dalton was able to take care of his goons, Ben is forced to bring out the big guns, or, more accurately, a loose cannon. This man is Knox, a perpetually cackling psychopath played by MMA fighter Conor McGregor in his first major acting role. To put it kindly, the chances of McGregor following in the footsteps of Dwayne Johnson and John Cena seem bleak. Eye-rollingly one-note, McGregor’s introduction just before the third act sends Road House further down the path of irredeemability.
It doesn’t help that Gyllenhaal, surrounded as he is by the most over-the-top performances this side of a Fast and Furious movie, seems to be playing the straight man. His skills at hamming it up are well known — remember Velvet Buzzsaw? — but the choice to be the sole toned-down presence in this highly stylised world populated by blues musicians, bare-knuckle boxers and brattish zamindars feels a little odd. To be clear, this is the movie in which he gets thrown into a river, run over by a car, and rammed into by a literal train — all in the span of 40 minutes — and picks himself back up with a shrug.
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In its final act, director Liman scales-up quite considerably by taking the action outdoors and into the sea. The CGI here is about as choppy as the artificial water, but more annoyingly, this sequence reduces Road House to a generic Hollywood action movie, as opposed to the enjoyable oddity that it was initially. Infamous for approaching his movies with a trademark ‘Li-mania’ — a cruder version of Michael Bay’s ‘Bayhem’ — Liman clearly seems to be having a ball in the fight sequences. The camerawork is flashy, the lighting by Henry Braham is typically evocative, and Gyllenhaal has always had the undeniably pull of a movie star. But Road House doesn’t come together as the sum of its well-oiled parts.
Road House
Director – Doug Liman
Cast – Jake Gyllenhaal, Billy Magnussen, Daniela Melchior, Conor McGregor
Rating – 2.5/5
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