Road House (2024)

Watched 3/22/24 (Prime Video)

The first tragedy of 2024. There’s a version of this that could have leaned into modern action filmmaking techniques and changed up the character to be more of a psychopath and actually works. But this ain’t that. It made the worst possible modern action decision in dumping just bucket over bucket of CG over every single punch, tackle, and roundhouse kick. It watered down Gyllenhaal’s psychosis into literally just one good scene, refusing to let him become the villain he should have become. And all that was just further smothered into boredom by an embarrassing romance subplot, if you can even call it that, and just pound for pound some of the worst dialogue and peripheral actors found in modern studio flicks outside of the Godzilla vs Kong franchise. 

Let’s start with Dalton. I am all for making Gyllenhaal a roided-out insane person who kills people and likes it. That was his Ambulance character minus the roids and plus herpes. I loved that. Wanted more of that energy here and you really only get it in the pool drowning scene. Everything else has him delivering the world’s most boring lines opposite the world’s worst actors. Outside of McGregor and Magnussen and the little guy whose arm he breaks, listening to Gyllenhaal interact with his co-stars is nails on a chalkboard. The bar owner was seemingly reading lines off of a sheet, the little kid and her stupid “Western” comments were atrocious, and the cop villain making money for being in this movie is like someone did their clueless grandpa a favor. That guy is just abysmal.

But the dialogue, man. Jake has nothing to work with. Nothing at all. Everyone says “fuck” AT LEAST once per sentence. It’s like whoever wrote the script just learned the word yesterday and got overexcited. The original movie has arguably worse dialogue, but there was truly care put into how cheesy and dumb it could be. Cheesy does not equal boring, which is what this movie’s every line was. I cannot remember a single solitary word from this other than “fuck.” Atrocious.

Why on God’s green Earth did Liman decide to shoot the fights this way? It’s seriously like AI took the movie away from him and recreated fight scenes in some bad video game engine. Completely unwatchable outside of a giant wood-splinter kill. I liked that one. But it was all so dulled by the horrid whip pans and odd lighting decisions that I couldn’t even feel slightly redeemed in that moment. I felt sad watching this. I can see why they put it on streaming. Even the color grading just screams streaming movie. This is legitimately a hard movie to write about because it is just so bland and limp-dicked. You don’t feel a single punch or smile a single smile, it’s just…there…on your tv.

And speaking of limp-dicked, I would be remiss not to call out the romance in this movie for not delivering a single moment of anything! Not funny not sexy not anything. Say what you will about Kelly Lynch’s acting in the original and in general but man her and Swayze have some chemistry and you can feel the steam. And she actually gets a pretty decent, funny arc in that one. The gal they got to do this one cannot compete with Kelly in any category and Jake is so bewildered and off in his own world during the majority of this movie that you kind of forget he’s even interested in women? It kind of seems like all he likes is fighting and watching fighting? Which, I get, but on the other hand why even have the romance in the movie? I would have cut those 20 minutes for more Jake killing people and the movie getting crazier instead of just watching these 2 brick walls talk to each other about nothing. Hollywood, I am asking you to put hot people in movies. And I am asking you to test their chemistry beforehand. And I am asking you to write good scenes for them or at least funny scenes. This had none of that energy. It felt written by someone that had never met a girl before.

This whole thing just grossed me out. If we’re gonna remake great movies, let’s put some effort in. Come on, now! I was rooting for this to be good! It was a top five most anticipated for me on the year between the cast and director—and it just kind of…exists.

2.5/10