Road House (2024)

Road-House-(2024)
Road House (2024)

This might sound mean, but some of the Looney Tunes-like qualities that this version of the 1989 Patrick Swayze cult classic has may actually benefit the film. Especially during the first hour because whenever Doug Liman and Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles Mondry set the table, it is a very fun era-style aesthetic feeling for long stretches. This obviously hilarious film no longer keeps throwing in successive absurdities and begins to take itself way too seriously, causing the sharp twists, bad delivery, and the not-bad CGI fight sequence appear in its worst forming in years. However, Jake Gyllenhaal gave a great performance that was fun and went from charming to menacing, and even that barely shines in a movie that needed to be sweaty and tense, like an action thriller but slowly turns more into the Saturday morning cartoon.

Elwood Dalton portrayed by Gyllenhaal has become an outcast, as seen in the beginning of Road House. Though the particulars are sketchy, it’s clear he is a superstar with such stature that even the threatening Post Malone shuns combat with him in the fight rings. (How do we even need to explain it? Would be interesting to see a former middleweight UFC champion like Gyllenhaal’s character, Gyllenhaal, on the screen.) Dalton is singled out by a fan, commentator, and television personality known as Frankie (Jessica Williams) who also happens to own a popular bar in popular fight maps, Road House in Florida’s town of Glass Key. For some weeks, her place has been under attack by some local thugs on motorcycles but has managed to hold its head up high. Her search for a bouncer leads her to Dalton which is exactly what she wants.

Certainly, “Road House” is not a simple film about a bouncer in a bar somewhere in the Florida Keys region. As it turns out, the trouble at Frankie’s bar does not only come from the alcoholics. A real estate mogul named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), the son of a mobster is working on making Frankie’s bar a non-operational venue. In a fluid succession of scenes that are amusingly staged and conceived as a confrontation between Dalton and Ben’s lackeys, the latter’s defeat is all but a foregone conclusion. They also have the effect of categorizing Dalton’s character as the sort of person who ensures his opponents end up in the hospital after he defeats them.

At the said hospital, Dalton encounters a doctor called Ellie, played by Daniela Melchior, who questions his “selflessness Indeed, he just got up with a whole gormless brigade in the ER, who otherwise wouldn’t need to be there, because he plays the bully” as she articulates. It’s clear that Ellie will be the woman who catches Dalton’s fancy, but it is quite annoying how long the movie takes to get to that point and then almost immediately fans out on their romance and turns Ellie’s life details into the story. It’s realistic why Dalton wouldn’t feel happy again going off the back of the personal torture that we learn about his character, but the relationship between Ellie and him is one of many in this film that feels incoherent and rather out of place. Back in the ‘80s when the movies that “Road House”, so desperately seeks to emulate, were being made, directors would be sure to depict the frisson that exists between Dalton and Ellie, eschewing the uncertain romance that develops in this case from a fundamental need in the story.

In terms of characterization, it’s one thing to be taken out by underwritten traits, but it’s another to suffer because of the general quality of “Road House” which certainly should have been much more visceral. This is the kind of picture that ought to transmit the heat of the Florida Keys, the pressure of a fist, and the resonance of a person hitting the floor. Of course, the carefully constructed sound effects are present; however, they seem to be fabricated in a computer effects workshop. It’s strange how the fight scenes that are supposed to be quick – like the very first one with the bikers, where Dalton relieves a man of his weapon to prevent him from actually firing it – work. However, every time “Road House” has to go into ‘extended action mode’, you are clearly aware of all the wires. Punches and their impact seem to be pre-rendered footage in video games somewhat embarrassingly often as they looked in a long bar brawl and a boat fight, both the last, which contained so much low-quality CGI that I suspect if this were overwhelming people in the cinema that Prime didn’t want this, because people would be considering screens.

Conor McGregor stars as Knox, a sociopath who suddenly shows up halfway through the movie to rendezvous with Dallas and complete the task. Knox is a welcome addition to an otherwise sagging movie, and in the end, McGregor’s acting is both captivating and thoroughly confusing as he delivers almost all his lines through a broadly amused grin as if taking the mickey out of the proceedings before a match. He walks about smiling like an aggressive Popeye and it appears Liman wanted him to overact so McGregor relocated to another planet. At certain moments, his odd line readings can sound downright bizarre, but perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be. Would it be too easy to assume that McGregor should be awkward since he is playing Johnson also a sociopath, or is it that he hardly knows how to string words in a sentence when he is on screen? You decide.

It may sound ridiculous, but that push and pull between realism and cartoonish insanity that lies in McGregor’s performance explains the quality of the movie as a whole. Gyllenhaal is making one movie a tale of an Ossis-style fighter raged beyond his limits while other characters like Magnusson and McGregor play the opposite and embrace the absurdity of things. The two never collapse together. Certainly, there are bits such as those in other ‘80s films that contain realistic protagonists and over-the-top antagonists, but this latest iteration of “Road House” makes one appreciate the balance of those unscrupulous elements more. And the absence of CGI.

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