Road House unabashedly touts its status as a Western. Actually, it’s like a wacky cartoon. I know it sounds awful, but this remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze film has some Identifiably Looney Tunes aspects that support its portrayal. Especially in the first hour, when director Doug Liman and Anthony Bagarozzi commence developing the story and Charles Mondry are presenting the premise, there is an enjoyable impact that lasts for quite a while. But once this absurd comedy tries to be serious, which it also expects from us too many times, then things just get absurd with ridiculous plot points, awkward voice acting, and perhaps the worst computer generated imagery for fighting sequences in the recent years. Through it all, Jake Gyllenhaal gives a performance depicting a scale from charming all the way to menacing but even that is drowned out in a storm of a film that needed to be intense and grueling but turns out to be something childish.
As the scene transitions with Elwood Dalton (Gyllenhaal) in the film “Road House”, one sees his glory days. We do not know how he fell, however, he is such a powerful figure that he can intimidate opponents (even Post Malone) to not step inside the combat ring in the first place. (And props to Gyllenhaal and his physical trainers for making him completely believable as a man who was once a UFC middleweight.) After what seems to be a foregone conclusion of a fight that wasn’t even on the schedule, Elle Williams’ character face poor Frankie (Jessica Williams) who runs an establishment in Glass Key, Florida with the fitting name Road House. For several weeks, her business has been harassed by local motorcycle thugs and she can hardly keep her doors open. She wants a bouncer & Dalton.
As we can imagine, however, “Road House” is not simply a movie about a bouncer at a bar somewhere closer to the Keys. It happens that the local’s brawls are not the only interesting part of the bar’s violence. Ben Brandt, the character played by Billy Magnussen, is a well known real estate mogul with a criminal father who controls all the businesses, and he wants Frankie to quit the grind. In enters Dalton, who dispatches Ben’s bouncers in scenes that are quite interesting in their choreography and idea. They establish the character of the protagonist, Dalton, as a man who is ruthless to his opponent and ensures he receives treatment at a hospital.
At the said hospital, Dalton has an encounter with a practitioner, Ellie (Daniela Melchior), who questions his so called altruism; after all, she has just been the one to receive a whole bunch of morons from the ER who wouldn’t have come there in the first place if he wasn’t being so much of a chump. It is rather obvious that Ellie will be the first object of affection for Dalton but the progression of the film takes a very long time to reach that point only to abandon it immediately and subsequently see characters who happen to be part of events in Ellie’s life be treated as twists. One can easily understand that Dalton has every right to be reluctant to get back to a state of happiness again after all the details of trauma that get brought out about his past, however, the nature of interaction between him and Ellie is one of several within this film which gets treated with a sense of instability and timidity of purpose. In the eighties films that ‘Road House’ longs the most to be, there would be real love between Dalton and Ellie whereas in these looking patches of friction that arise here more out of narrative convenience than imagination.
There might be a severe lack of focus on developing character interactions within the film called Road House but that is certainly not the case for the style of the film. That was something that needed to be far more visceral in Road House as there is rarely any emotion during the film. The viewer should have been able to appreciate the heat and beauty of the surroundings, the audible sound of a fist connecting with someone’s body and also the sound of someone hitting the pavement after being thrown. The sound of a body hitting the hallmark may be unattractive, it simply looks as if it was all made in a computerized setting. The film focuses on brawls and fighting, there was clear direction on how the scenes and fights were shot. The first fight scene, which features the biker gang and Dalton is loveable. It is a scene where Dalton, as the name suggests, is too famous for them. However, one issue arises within Roadhouse and that, whenever the viewer is expecting a massive fight sequence, there is a focus on preparing the audience for that, and once again, they are let down. Such scenes must have looked very dull with simplistic animation, almost like cut scenes from most video games. Regardless of what scene was being viewed, disarming somebody or throwing a solid haymaker. One of the fights features a long series of brawling and there was an amateur camera and sound that seemed unfinished.
Last, but certainly not the least, is Conor McGregor who plays Knox. Conor McGregor locks aim with an intense and aggressive pulse with sociopath type traits focusing on randomness in the second half of the movie where he teams up with Dalton. Knox is able to provide help to some extent to a movie that’s getting dry, but McGregor’s performance is also currently both interesting and strange, all his parts being delivered through a huge grin on his face, like he is acting at a weigh in stage ahead of a fight. He is like an aggro over sized Popeye, flexing and showing his muscles, and one can’t help but feel that Liman probably enabled him to die with the clip and McGregor did indeed achieve this anyway. Some of the bad line readings he delivers are clearly awkward in their delivery, however perhaps that’s the point anyway. The film oscillates between these two extremes creating the narrative whether McGregor acts as a sociopath because that’s the character or is it a case of the fighter totally unable to arrange words in screen view.
Call it absurdity, if you will, that dialectic of realism and the cartoon props which rests in the performance of McGregor hints at the quality of the movie as a whole. Gyllenhaal is shooting one film, the tale of a rage Zen warrior, while people like Magnusson and McGregor find their characters in the parody. The two never come together, Of course, there are many ‘80s films populated by restrained protagonists and over the top antagonists but this fresh take on the “Road House” makes one value the articulation of the two’s ratios more.
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