Imagine that you’re a bouncer in a scuzzy small-town bar where some of the world’s nastiest drunks go at one another with fists, knives, and broken beer bottles—and that’s on a good night. Forced to risk life and limb intervening in non-stop flareups of physical violence, what do you do? A better question: What would Patrick Swayze do? The movie is “Road House,” a critically mauled, cult-reclaimed smash-’em-up from 1989, and Swayze, as Dalton, the bar’s newly hired cooler, offers a handy crash course in the art of de-escalation. “One, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected,” he says. “Two, take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary. And, three, be nice.”
Sound advice, and, until the time comes for him to rip out an assailant’s throat, Dalton heeds it scrupulously. He minds his manners, underestimates (almost) no one, and takes to the outdoors like a Zen monk, his oil-slicked torso catching the sunlight just so during Tai Chi practice. But not every Swayze character is oily in such a desirable way. In the eerie Reaganite suburbia of “Donnie Darko” (2001), an even darker vision of the nineteen-eighties, we find Swayze as Jim Cunningham, a smooth motivational speaker with a bad case of soul rot. In lieu of self-defense tips, he offers useless self-help platitudes: “Son, violence is a product of fear. Learn to truly love yourself.” No wonder it’s so satisfying when the troubled young Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) steps up to the mike and lets this charlatan have it: “I think you’re the fucking Antichrist.”
The confrontation is over almost before it begins, but watching it again recently I couldn’t help imagining what would have happened if the two had come to blows. In a bout between Donnie Darko and Dirty Dancer, who would win? Swayze had already moved on from the action-movie glories of “Road House” and “Point Break” (1991), but could he have prevailed based on his golden-god physicality alone? Or would the young Gyllenhaal have revealed, beneath the baby fat and the gawky smile, some of the vengeful fighting spirit he would later display in the frenzied boxing drama “Southpaw” (2015)?
The energetic but dim remake of “Road House,” directed by Doug Liman, is hardly the picture to settle the question, much less inspire any new ones. The movie passes from memory as quickly as it passes on the screen. But there’s a poignancy to the sight of Gyllenhaal, now forty-three and shredded to the max, paying tribute to his late former screen partner. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton isn’t a bouncer by trade. He had been an Ultimate Fighting Championship star until he snapped and pummelled an opponent to a pulp—a career-ending trauma that still haunts his dreams. Now he lives out of his car and is trying to earn money by signing up for freelance fights. But even the toughest opponents (including one played by Austin Post, a.k.a. the rapper Post Malone) tend to forfeit in fear.
It’s at one of these aborted fights that Dalton catches the attention of Frankie (Jessica Williams), who offers him a job cooling the riffraff at her roadhouse down in the Florida Keys. After briefly weighing his options, including suicide, Dalton accepts. But why? Does he want to visit Ernest Hemingway’s house or check out the bridge that got blown up in “True Lies” (1994)? Maybe he realizes that he still has some fight in him; then again, maybe he thinks his death wish might yet be granted. In any case, Gyllenhaal is a skilled enough actor to keep you guessing. His earnest Eagle Scout grin has always possessed an animating touch of madness; you’ll even find traces of it in his good-guy roles, in “Zodiac” (2007) and “Prisoners” (2013), where his characters’ dogged pursuit of justice tilts a bit too easily into obsession. A little of this ferocity goes a long way: witness his most flamboyantly creepy turn, in the unhinged media satire “Nightcrawler” (2014). Here, his undercurrent of menace works nicely; it’s just the thing to throw an otherwise formulaic affair pleasurably off balance. In that respect, “Road House” is very much in his wheelhouse.
The first “Road House” was directed by Rowdy Herrington, presumably because Stompy McFisticuffs was unavailable. Released theatrically in May, 1989, the movie got a bit lost during a summer that brought us “Batman,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Lethal Weapon 2,” “Ghostbusters II,” “The Abyss,” and “Licence to Kill.” Fire “Road House” up again thirty-five years later, though, and an exploding jukebox of trashy delights awaits, along with a jolting reminder of what Hollywood action movies used to look like. The flesh comes in two forms, seductively photographed and viciously pulverized. The idiot plot is delivered with an impressively straight face: night after night, brawl after brawl, the bar becomes ground zero in a battle for a small town’s soul. On one side are a scheming tycoon and his team of regulation plug-uglies. On the other side are Dalton, his bouncers, a sexy doctor, a few salt-of-the-earth grunts, and a drawling Sam Elliott, who proves Dalton’s equal—and maybe even his superior—in pinup-worthy pulchritude.
The remake’s writers, Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, stick to the first film’s narrative blueprint, as if to signal a return to B-movie basics. The hope is that you’ll chuckle more in recognition than in derision when a doctor (Daniela Melchior) provides Dalton with more than strictly medical attention, or when the movie’s highly swattable rich-boy villain (Billy Magnussen) swans around on a yacht. A far more formidable figure is the hit man Knox, an aptly named fortress of a fellow who, as played by the professional fighter Conor McGregor, crashes through the proceedings like an Irish-accented wrecking ball. McGregor’s flamboyant line readings may be as painful to endure as his punches, but he has wild-eyed energy to burn, and he gets a hell of an entrance, striding through an open marketplace with nary a stitch of clothing or a hint of shame. It’s a good sight gag, even as it reveals a certain timidity in the movie: it’s telling that the one instance of nudity is played not for titillation but for laughs.
Everyone else stays mostly covered, frequent shots of Gyllenhaal’s slashed and battered torso notwithstanding. “Road House” itself often feels hemmed in, awkwardly suspended between modern-day genre outing and unironic eighties-movie homage. The writers have understandably discarded some of the original’s less palatable lines (“I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”), and they’ve added a little snap to the material, mainly courtesy of a hungry crocodile. Less successfully, they’ve coated dialogue in a hip sheen of self-awareness: hence the friendly bookstore worker (Hannah Lanier) who likens Dalton, rather wishfully, to a character in a Western. Which Western, exactly? “The Man Who Plowed His 4x4 Into Liberty Valance”?
In an unsurprising concession to our era of instant gratification, Gyllenhaal’s Dalton begins hurting people a lot sooner than his predecessor did. He does still endeavor to be nice, though, and it’s amusing when he brings a group of troublemakers outside, teaches them all a well-earned lesson, and then drives them to the hospital. They’re lucky, at least for now. Yet to come are wounds that no doctor can treat, some of them inflicted by boats and others by bombs. (Both “Road House” movies bear the stamp of the veteran producer Joel Silver, for whom fiery explosions are a gratifying must.) You can see why the violence, toggling between intimate, close-quarters stabbery and Looney Tunes-level absurdism, must have appealed to Liman, who’s proved a smart, versatile action director, in films as different as “The Bourne Identity” (2002) and “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014). He wisely shoots the bar brawls in mostly long, uninterrupted takes, moving the camera in synch with the actors and cutting more for clarity than sensation. But such continuity of movement has a way of spoiling its own illusion, exposing digital seams and artificial thwacks that have clearly been applied in post-production.
It may be that the uncanny-valley flaws are more glaringly apparent on the big screen. If so, most viewers will never see them, owing to some behind-the-scenes butting of heads that’s nearly as outlandish as the melees onscreen. It’s a measure of the new Hollywood economy that, despite having premièred earlier this month to a raucous and appreciative audience at the SXSW film festival, “Road House” is bypassing theatres entirely and beaming directly into your Amazon Prime Video queue. Liman has protested the decision, and it’s hard not to empathize. “Road House” is far from a great movie, but what pleasures it generates, novel or nostalgic, muscular or meagre, are surely best experienced—and possibly even magnified—in the company of a crowd. ♦
