In recent years, with fun but silly schlock like Ambulance and The Covenant, Jake Gyllenhaal has been actively shedding his old ‘prestige picture’ baggage in favour of chasing old-school action star thrills and now, with Doug Liman’s Road House remake, this process has reached new heights. With bruising action in sun-soaked Florida settings, MMA fights shot in front of real UFC crowds, and Conor McGregor as his co-star, here Gyllenhaal leans further into pure, brain-off entertainment than he maybe ever has before. For better and worse, Road House is a film purpose-built for a tipsy night in with friends (it’s going straight to Prime Video streaming without so much as a courtesy week in cinemas), an admittedly not very high bar that it still clears with style.
Gyllenhaal, naturally, takes on the Patrick Swayze role from the ‘80s original, still called Dalton but this time a formerly celebrated UFC fighter who has been mired in self-destructive hatred ever since he accidentally killed a fellow fighter in the octagon. Spending his time winning underground bare-knuckle competitions simply by turning up and scaring everyone else away, he’s given new purpose by bar owner Frankie (Jessica Williams), whose Florida beachfront establishment is attracting some overly violent patrons and needs protection.
From here, Dalton becomes embroiled in a nefarious scheme involving entitled local business bigwig Brandt (Billy Magnussen) and his psychotic enforcer Knox (McGregor), who are looking to destroy Frankie’s bar to make way for a high-end resort. It’s not a hugely engaging plot and Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry’s script often borders on the outright inane, especially when it has to deal with exposition, but Gyllenhaal’s magnetic charm keeps the whole thing moving, and it’s really the fights you’re here to see anyway.
With The Bourne Identity back in 2002, Liman helped reinvent the language of blockbuster hand-to-hand combat and it’s to his credit that he doesn’t rest on his laurels here. It would have been easy to just stick with the shakycam close-up style of Bourne or simply copy the John Wick model as so many action films of the past six or seven years have, but Road House has an approach all its own, dedicated to getting you as close to the fights as possible until you can almost feel the blows raining down on you. When it works, it’s a great approach, especially in a surprisingly polite five-on-one brawl early in the film, which is both exciting and hilarious as Gyllenhaal demolishes all five opponents, but there are also a few moments in which the camerawork and choreography seem to be at odds with another instead of working in tandem.
You never doubt Gyllenhaal’s combat prowess for a second, though, and McGregor is, of course, convincing as a human wrecking ball (in a fun but wince-inducing running gag, he’s constantly punching directly through glass). It would be a stretch to call his performance here ‘good’ or even really ‘acting’, but he’s immensely fun whenever he pops up on screen, getting a lot of the film’s biggest laughs, leaning in to all the most outsized elements of his public persona while also being surprisingly game to look a fool when he needs to.
Despite all the broken limbs and traumatic brain injuries, Road House is also a real boon to the Florida tourist board, all warm summer-y skies and clear blue waters and it’s here that you might rather wish that Amazon had granted it a big screen release. It’s odd that they didn’t – I’m sure you could pack a few cinemas out with McGregor fans alone, and some of the rowdier sequences do really call for full-crowd reactions – but it also does neatly reflect this particular film’s particular modest ambitions. Though there are a couple of sequel teases, this is not The Next Big Franchise and it’s absolutely not trying to be, it’s just down-and-dirty entertainment to be swigged down in one night and forgotten in a haze the next morning.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 