Movie Review : Road House (2024)
Chuck Klosterman said about the original Road House: "Every single scene includes at least one detail that could never happen in real life. So does that make Road House bad? No. It makes Road House perfect." It's crazy movie, but it doesn't mean to be realistic and it could've never existed in the internet age where everything and nothing is under an insane amount of scrutiny. Except it does. A Road House for the millennial shouldn't work, but you should think of it as a Road House BY the millennials.
That somehow changes everything.
Road House is what you call a soft reboot. It tells more or less the same story as the original, but the characters and the circumstances are different. Adapted to their time, if you will. Even this Dalton is different. Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is not a philosophy graduate from NYU, but a disgraced UFC fighter who killed someone in the Octagon. Taking underground fights to survived, he's hired by a Floridian bar owner (Shriking's Jessica Williams) to clean up her clientele in a town under the spell of a rotten land developer.
A (Somewhat) Responsible Male Fantasy
Although it has little to do with the original, this remake of Road House get its. It's a testosterone-fueled fantasy where a man devoured by his own violence finds himself in a situation where it can be put to good use. Journeyman director Doug Liman establishes this from the get-go, where Dalton engages in a fight with four opponents using only slaps. That shit would never fly in a real fight, but who cares? It’s funny and cinematic and it exists within the confines of a film who doesn't pretend to be realistic.
This Dalton is psychologically quite different from the original, though. Patrick Swayze was a moral authority who believed in enforcing respect through the threat of violence only he could uphold. Gyllenhaal is a man adrift, who understands the consequences of his gift for physical confrontation. He's extremely confident like his predecessor, but this confidence comes from somewhere else. It's fatalistic. Elwood Dalton understands his violence is inevitable and will always leave him dispossessed.
So, Road House is different in this way. It doesn't believe in the American ideal that you can punch and kick (and shoot) all your problems into oblivion. It has integrated three and a half decades of hypermediated brutality into a sexy and colourful film that somehow doesn’t cut the corners on the consequences of these splurges of ultraviolence. It created a paradigm where it can freely exist (it could theoretically happen in Florida). but where it wouldn’t magically make everyone happy.
Conor McGregor and Grand Theft Auto
Conor McGregor has a smaller role than advertised in this movie. He doesn't appear until at least halfway through and really, this Road House could've existed without him. But it's great that he's there. He's basically cosplaying the man he's always wanted to be (at least, according to his public persona). A boundless villain who just takes and takes and does whatever the fuck he wants, whenever the fuck he wants. He's a Grand Theft Auto character controlled by a snot-nosed thirteen year old looking to make terrible life choices.
McGregor's character Knox is an urban djinn, a malevolent spirit conjured by American greed to kill, maim and torture what’s left of integrity inside good, God-fearing working class people. He exists both physically and metaphorically in Road House. Knox has nothing to do whatsoever with the problem that needs solving, but Dalton needs to confront him anyway. Because by defeating Knox. he can defeat the unbridled violence within. Is it far fetched? Absolutely. Does it work? You bet your sweet ass it does.
This is a proper Road House movie.
*
I was not expecting this remake of Road House to be this good, but it is. It works even if it shouldn’t. It works because it is a fantasy like the original. It also works because it's a fantasy that accounts for everything we've learned about violence over the last thirty-five years. It can exist within movie, but it also needs to show that you don’t get a wife, forty acres and a mule anymore for slaughtering your neighbor even if he's an asshole. Road House does that. I’m as shocked as you are, but this movie it really good.
