About five minutes of the new remake of Road house, your hero comes close to killing himself by deliberately parking his car on some train tracks as a locomotive passes through an intersection. At the last minute he changes his mind. The hero survives by the slimmest of margins; so thin, in fact, that the back of its beater is cut off and destroyed by the train.
There might be a metaphor somewhere. A remake of Road house – any remake of Casa da Estrada — It should be a train wreck. If you asked me “What is the best way to redo Road house?” A few years ago, my response would have been “Don’t even try such a ridiculous idea.”
The original Road house is one of the strangest films ever made by a major Hollywood studio. It could only have been produced in the 1980s and only works (“works”) as a silly, bizarre and painfully serious relic of a bygone era, where security guards were treated like the biggest celebrities in the world and people were so desperate for a place to drink who would willingly go to the most dangerous bar on the planet, night after night, knowing full well that they might get stabbed just to get a shot of whiskey. (I should note that everything I know about the 1980s I learned from watching Road house. If this is inaccurate, I apologize.)
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This is a film where Patrick Swayze the propensity for ripping out guys’ throats is treated as a tragic backstory It is running subplot, It is where a man being crushed by a falling polar bear barely makes the list of craziest moments on screen. How do you remake what?
It is unlikely that the creators of the new Road housewhich goes straight to streaming on Amazon Main video, pulled it. His creation is close enough to the broad strokes of the old film to deserve its title, but different enough that fans of the original might be surprised by some of its plot and character twists.
The central figure is once again a preternaturally talented bouncer named Dalton, who is hired to clean up a notoriously rowdy bar. While the original Road house 1989 never revealed the origin of Dalton’s incredible combat skills (or why he only uses them to kick drunks out of rock clubs), the remake explains both. It’s Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) was an elite UFC fighter, until a bad choice in the octagon put him on the path to becoming a director Douglas Liman finds it at the beginning of its Casa da Estrada — namely at rock bottom, where he thinks about becoming extremely familiar with an approaching train.
When Dalton decides he’s not ready to die, he reluctantly accepts a job from Frankie (Jessica Williams) cleaning up the riff-raff at her Florida Keys tavern, which is cleverly called “The Road House.” Beating up drunks is easy for Dalton; As a result, navigating local Florida politics becomes significantly more complicated.
It turns out that many of the Road House’s more rambunctious patrons drink there at Ben Brandt’s request (Billy Magnussen), son of a shady local businessman who is currently in prison. Ben wants to step out of his father’s shadow by building his own quasi-legal empire in the Keys, but the Road House poses an obstacle to his plans. Dalton’s arrival disrupts Ben’s schemes, and when the town’s new bully refuses to be intimidated, an equally imposing brute named Knox (MMA star Conor McGregor) is enlisted to take him down.
McGregor makes a big impression in his film debut. Combining the charisma that made him the UFC’s biggest draw with a palpable sense of uncontrolled mania, he becomes a far more intimidating figure than anyone else in the original film. Road house. (That film’s main villain was played by 59-year-old Ben Gazzara.) If McGregor gets tired of getting hit in the head for money, he could have a very lucrative second career playing movie heavyweights.
It’s hard to talk about what makes Gyllenhaal’s Dalton so fun to watch without spoiling some Road housesurprises. Although Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry’s script mirrors the original in many ways – and its writers, David Lee Henry, is co-credited with the new film’s story – it often subverts viewers’ expectations in very pleasing ways. As it gradually moves away from the original Road houseThe story hits, it started to remind me less and less of the 1989 film and more and more of the books by crime novelist Elmore Leonard. No one was better than Leonard in this kind of darkly comedic thriller set in a morally gray universe. (Leonard also composed some of his best books, including Take it easy It is rum punchin South Florida.)
The new film is not light action; The first image of the film is a point of view of a fighter throwing a punch. Many more fight sequences follow; some of them viscerally choreographed, and some a little deftly knitted together with lots of flashy, digitally enhanced long takes. But 2024 Road house also knows how to control the pace and let the audience immerse themselves in that decadent South Florida atmosphere. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton enjoys several prickly scenes with a local doctor (Daniel Melchior), and he also uses his laconic charm in a subplot involving a curious teenager (Hannah Love Lanier) who works in her father’s dilapidated bookstore.
Gyllenhaal’s Dalton becomes an accidental shoemaker as he tries to understand why his presence upsets Ben Brandt so much. In a meta sense, his attempts to get to the bottom of this mystery are also an attempt to get to the bottom of Swayze. Road house. This movie makes absolutely no sense – did I mention that Swayze’s Dalton was also an NYU philosophy grad who could stitch up his own knife wounds? – and yet it so consistently adheres to its own impossible internal logic that it accrues a kind of spiritual purity that’s hard not to like.
The new film tries to figure out a way to justify many of the Road houseinexplicable peculiarities. Moving the action from rural Missouri to the Sunshine State certainly doesn’t hurt; Much of the customers’ comically unhinged behavior can now be attributed to a massive case of Florida Man Syndrome. Still, the new Road house never gets too bogged down in rationalizing or defending himself; it understands the central appeal of the premise (i.e., it’s fun) and manages to recapture it, even if it does so in a slightly different way.
Road house It became a cult classic because it was fun to watch on cable. None of this was difficult to understand – or at least none of it made any difference. any less sense – if you turn towards it halfway. No matter where you started or stopped watching, you were bound to see some emotions, some violence, some sex appeal, and probably some laughs, intentional or not.
While the cable TV movie ecosystem appears to be extinct, the new Road house I would have thrived on that too. This is the kind of consistently entertaining film that you could happily watch 100 times without ever actively intending to watch it twice. In the end, it builds up the atmosphere of a large bar; a place where you go less to get drunk than to absorb the vibes of the music and the patrons. It’s much better than it should be.
RATING: 7/10
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Gallery credit: Claire Epting