THB #509: The Road To Road House '24

It shoulda been a contenda.

Doug Liman didn’t really remake Road House. He took the outline and made it his own thing, with the help of screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry and a bunch of others along the way. He came up with a fight mode that probably has a name, but should probably be called ConcussionVision. He has skill with the camera. Always has.

Is it good? Yeah, good... in a very specific way.

Is it as good as Rowdy Herrington’s beloved 1989 saga of fighting and music that is endlessly quotable and fantastically silly? Well, it’s very much not the same. The odd combination of more-dancer-than-fighter Patrick Swayze, the odd rail-thin-with-implants beauty of Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott as the guy you would always want to hang with who has your back, Meho, and the legendary Ben Gazzara as an aging exotic holding on too tight to being the big fish in a small pond, plus a parade of very likeable good kids and very nasty and never-became-famous snarling bad guys is still magical. The best kind of bad imaginable.

But Road House ‘24 turns out to be an absolutely worthy take on that ultimate Hollywood grindhouse movie, in all the best and worst ways.

The Road House of the title is kind of insane. It’s owned by Jessica Williams, who is always a pleasure to watch, but how she ended up owning and maintaining a large road side bar in the Florida Keys with constant high-quality bands playing and constant fighting customers… well, silly. She thinks she can higher an MMA fighter to cool the place and ends up with a guy she wasn’t expecting, whose history - which we will slowly learn - makes him too scary to fight. The film cleverly hires Arturo Castro, who usually plays soft guys, as a hard guy… because he can help bring humor to the film.

The Girl is Daniela Melchior, who is beautiful in a not-ostentatious way. But not played as a sex object. When there is sex, it’s PG… not even PG-13. The rich bad guy is Billy Magnussen, who is very good at playing self-involved braying jackasses, but is another lead actor who is little recognized.

One of the major changes from the ’89 film is the reason why the villain wants the Road House. It is not well defined here. But worse, it lacks the element of it being such an ego thing, which plays with surprising believably with Gazarra and just seems like another way of being an asshole with Magnussen. I don’t blame the actor… the unexpected consequence of making the change in the character in that slot.

Also… coming along at various moments are Post Malone and Conor McGregor as tough guys. McGregor particularly hams it up, giving up the most cleavage in the film… butt cleavage. And there is a crocodile.

Jake Gyllenhaal is so bulked up that we can believe that he can take a knife to the gut and just keep going. His Dalton can be cool and can take it, but his secret “skill” is that he is hiding from himself and his preternatural ability to dish it out, which scares him.

It’s kind of like a musical, except instead of dances, there are fights or assaults or attempts to maim or murder or explode, etc. Gyllenhaal does some of the things he is good at, as a funny charmer.

The movie does what it is meant to do. Lima chews the scenery from the director’s chair. It’s not “you’ve never seen anything like it” great, but there is stuff we haven’t seen and it moves along at the right pace. I don’t go to bars as I once did… but I never remember this many guys who seem a lot more interested in fighting, with weapons, than trying to get laid. (“People seem a little aggressive around here,” says Dalton ‘24 at one quiet point.)

I can’t say that I really missed the overt sexuality of the women from the ‘89 film while I was watching it… but thinking about the film afterwards, it is interesting that there is almost none of the showing off to impress the girls of the original. And while I am thinking about it, none of the edge-of-gay male interactions either. (“I used to fuck guys like you in prison,” is the most infamous, after which you believe that character - Jimmy - would really like to have sex with Dalton ‘89 by force.)

But the most important thing about Road House is that it is on my TV today as a direct-to-Streaming premiere.

It should have been a theatrical release. At every level, it should have been.