Jake Gyllenhaal can do anything, except give Taylor her red
scarf back, apparently
dir: Doug Liman
2024
There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.
I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.
I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?
If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?
Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?
The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.
It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.
Gyllenhaal’s Dalton has the physique someone only gets when they have a team of people helping them, working out four hours a day, with a dietician carefully hand feeding you boiled chicken breast and quinoa. He believes he can beat anyone that comes along because his physique screams “I’ve killed people in the octagon”
To his credit (please don’t think I’m forgetting that this film shouldn’t exist), Gyllenhaal does saunter through the film with a lowkey, affable manner to him. He never feels the need to raise his voice, because he knows he can easily beat almost anyone that might attack him.
In one of the flicks most idiotic moments, an opening scene has a fight between Post Malone and some other generic bald guy. Post Malone, either the guy himself or the character he’s playing, is a brute that beats some other guy into submission, in an open contest, where he takes on all comers. For money, no less. The gentleman’s pursuit of fisticuffs in underground fights is further sullied when Dalton turns up, takes his top off, and Post Malone, in terror, refuses to fight him, and Dalton is handed the pot of money.
Dalton gets paid even though there’s no fight. Now that’s late stage capitalism for you.
Now, before you think I was just scene-setting by referring to the opening moments of the movie, what I want to point out is that many of the problems with the flick are there, emblematically, in that opening scene. Much of the fighting is, for reasons I haven’t been able to figure out, CGI. As in, computer generated Post Malone, throwing around a computer generated guy who isn’t Post Malone.
Does that…make any sense to you? Does that compute?
It does not. Whatever you might think about someone who has a lot of tattoos on his face, or about his music, the important thing to note is that Post Malone’s character is posited as some fearsome fighter, despite the fact that, despite the decades between us, his physique pretty much matches my own, and, ladies and gentlepersons of the jury I assure you, I am no fighter.
What I couldn’t for the fucking life of me figure out is why you would get Post Malone at all, but also, how could it make sense financially to do it with digital imagery rather than two trained stunt guys with a minimum of fight choreography. Two guys who know how to throw punches (without connecting), and how to make a fight look real without hurting anyone.
They’ve been doing that in movies for at least the last hundred years.
Instead they employed a team of programmers to do it. It’s not the only time it’s done, and it looks terrible, I have to say. Maybe they were “inspired” by a lot of the camerawork from something like the Creed boxing flicks, which has a sinuous weaving in and out of the fight quality, but none of that is apparent in that first terrible scene where it looks like two plasticine figures are fighting it out for the right to marry Gumby.
Dalton is lured to Florida, of all places, to work his magic at a bar called “Road House”. Just to clue you in, the one in the original flick was called the Double Deuce. Here, it’s just “Road House”, because this flick is Road House, and things just need to be called what they are called because otherwise people might get confused.
I was surprised when the bad guys turned up and didn’t say “Hi, we’re the bad guys. My name is Bad H. Guy, pleasure to make your acquaintance.” But bad guys do turn up, and Dalton beats them up. But then they turn up again! So he beats them more. So more bad people try to do bad things.
But Dalton beats them up more. It’s almost like someone has plans for the Road House. Maybe it’s a neighbour who doesn’t like the drinking and licentiousness, or the noise, maybe?
No, it’s a developer (Billy Magnusson), on a yacht, who insists on being shaved during choppy seas, by a deckhand with a straight razor. Which, yeah, I can see that we’re meant to hate him, because he’s a rich, grasping fuckhead, but honestly, does he have to be so fucking stupid as well?
And there’s a corrupt sheriff, and there’s a doctor love interest, and then there’s fucking Conor McGregor.
You may be lucky enough to not know who he is, but, since the hook in this flick is that Dalton is an ex-MMA superstar, perhaps it makes sense to have this disturbed, gurning lunatic in the film, playing a disturbed, gurning lunatic. All I have to say about it is that McGregor has probably earned over half a billion dollars from his fighting career. He doesn’t need the work. Let him go back to doing what he does best, which is punching people in the face who aren’t fighters, and sexually assaulting women, and then threatening them afterwards to make it all go away.
He is, to put things in perspective, an even bigger piece of shit than the violent piece of shit he plays in this movie, but, that’s not to say he’s good as a whatever next level villain he’s meant to be. He literally strides around like someone who’s only recently learned to walk upright, delivering line readings that never sound convincing.
You just know there are a bunch of scenes where they gave up trying to get him to do the line again, because they sensed time was slipping away from them, like it is for all of us
MacGregor is just appalling, and since the climactic fight at the end, which again relies on a bizarre level of CGI, is resolved with grown muscly men staking each other with bits of wood, you could be forgiven for thinking that absolutely anyone else could have played the role.
And then the hero rolls out of town again, looking forward to his sequel, in some other shittier Southern town, where, fingers crossed, Dalton gets to rip someone’s throat out, in order to properly pay homage to Patrick Swayze, and even worse, has to fight Conor McGregor again, because sequels...
Look, I’m not criticising this flick because they had the temerity to remake an alleged classic. The original Road House is not a good film, but it was insane and enjoyable. It was because Swayze didn’t look like a brute and had a manner about him that made it so great. Plus it had Sam Elliott in it, as Wade Garrett, the best cooler of them all. Every flick with Sam Elliott in it, and his moustache, is infinitely better than without it, but in Road House he had five day growth and long hair!
He looked like the Greek god chumps like Gyllenhaal and McGregor could only wish they could look like with their washboard sculpted abs and vein-bulging necks.
Wonderful as Gyllenhaal is in this, as he is in most things, it’s not enough. This flick is the perfect example of familiar streaming content – it’s a shoulder shrug that pretends we have nothing better to do with our time, with our lives.
To that I say this – don’t mistake my proclivity for watching so many movies with indifference or a desire to be distracted. That’s not why I watch movies. I watch them to praise those who create something meaningful or enjoyable, and condemn those who do its opposite.
Road House 2024 has no more reason to exist than Post Malone or Conor McGregor – the world is a worse place with these three in it.
5 times I don’t want to watch McGregor again in anything ever again out of 10
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“I just wanted to get you outside so I could ask you and your friends respectfully to leave the premises.” – politeness is underrated in this age of barbarians - Road House
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