Rowdy Herrington’s Road House (1989) rides the wave of a formless fantasy vibe; a world where a Ph.D. educated, aimless drifter bouncer could blow into a Midwest town and straighten out all the problems with a sly wink and a good punch. It’s just extant, never quite moving in any particular direction, the pure essence of ‘80s masculine idealism turned into a cold beer and splashed onto film. That’s why the mere prospect of remaking it seems laughable – the world where Patrick Swayze sitting in a bar backed by the twangy crooning of Jeff Healy’s guitar could form a whole movie just doesn’t exist anymore.
The best thing that Doug Liman’s updated remake understands is that the original film is almost a fluke – made with such an earnest and endearing absurdity that it was almost destined to become a cult classic. It seems implicitly understood here that you can’t force your way into that, and it’s immediately clear that this isn’t really a remake of Road House, it’s more a total reimagining. Though it feels like we’re beyond the halcyon days of the macho heartthrob that made Swayze the perfect leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal does a damn fine job of taking the mantle, embodying just the right degree of familiar breezy charm. What’s gone is the ineffable, impossible background that made Swayze’s character such an affable hero despite being a fairly empty tough guy tinged with misogyny and homophobia; replaced with a hard edged violent past and a disposition more attuned to keeping himself from tumbling into bloody oblivion than any attempt to be some dusty cowboy savior.
Liman’s film is driven by a much more structured narrative, an arc that slowly ratchets up the stakes until it explodes into breezy tropical mayhem that draws more from Thomas Carter’s Miami Vice pilot than it does from the pulpy destruction of its source material. Moving the action down to the glistening beaches of the Florida Keys – coincidentally the last American vestige of places that are believably run by trust fund thugs, rowdy bar violence, and hungry crocodiles – the film follows Gyllenhaal’s Dalton after he gets picked up from a deathmatch underground fight by bar owner Frankie (Jessica Williams). His job is to clean up her rowdy seaside roadhouse, beset with macho Florida Men who aren’t getting caught up in drunken anarchy as much as they are vessels of drug-fueled haphazard destruction, maybe in service of a vapid landowner’s inane scheme or maybe just doing it because they believe it’s some sort of patriotic right.
When Road House settles into the cool, breezy vibes that tropical sunset romances, a twangy upbeat soundtrack, and the swift dispatch of drunk faux-tough bros can provide, it comes incredibly close to being a stone-cold classic of pulpy, charming fun. The primary and critical fault here is that Liman just can’t direct the action. It all comes across as hollow sludge, a real misstep for a film that hinges largely on its action when the focus shifts from effortless beach vibes into gritty thriller violence. The problem is compounded by the fact that when you can look through the thick glossy coating that makes it all so impenetrably ugly, you can tell there’s real, effective choreography under the surface. Like the infuriating knowledge that comes with watching 2011’s remake of The Thing and knowing that the hideous CGI is all informed by a bunch of beautiful practical work that was painted over in post, Road House is flooded with an onslaught of bruiser action scenes “punched-up” with CGI in a weak attempt to sell impact. Compounded by messy, chaotic editing that fits the political paranoia of The Bourne Identity (2002) but obfuscates and obstructs here, nearly everything that dares to elevate this to becoming its own kind of vulgar auteurism cult classic is lost in a sea of digital blurs and empty impact.
Despite seemingly trying to sabotage itself at every angle, missing the memo that contemporary blockbuster action has largely moved on from forgettable sludge to lean, aggressive precision, Road House is still a cold beer of a film; refreshing, cheap, and mostly exactly what you expect it to be. Billy Magnussen plays a cartoonishly evil resort mogul, Conor McGregor plays an implacable coked-out psychopath who exists purely to tear Dalton limb from limb, and a guy gets sliced up like Robert Englund in Eaten Alive (1976). Even when the visual aesthetic of the action can’t match up, the commitment to its slugger brutality carries a high-octane propulsion that makes an impossible update a pretty convincing prospect.