Review of the movie Road House

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the virtuoso fighter Dalton in the remake of the 1989 old-school action movie Road House, which originally starred Patrick Swayze. The modern version of the b-movie classic was released online immediately after the theatrical release and showed the most successful start in the history of Amazon Prime Video streaming service.

The ’80s were the heyday of B-movies. But then they changed their name to direct-to-video, which means “movies intended directly for home video.” And although the original Roadhouse was released on the big screen first, and then on home media, critics categorized it as a B-movie for its low quality rather than its low aesthetics, and even Swayze’s performance was criticized, not to mention the production and script. Later, the film was revised and reassessed, and even then it joined the ranks of cult old-fashioned action movies.

And it’s extremely interesting that the 2024 remake has caused such a stir online. After all, the director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow) deliberately and intentionally did not modernize the concept according to fashion trends. That is, formally, of course, he transferred the events to our time, but, rewriting the old story, he deliberately did not take into account any of the current cultural and, in particular, cinematic trends. In other words, in an era when masculinity has become a commonly accepted target of public condemnation, Lyman made an emphatically masculine action movie where only muscles play, deliberately and completely ignoring intelligence and femininity.

Let me remind you that Swayze played James Dalton, who was invited to work as a bouncer in a roadside bar in the middle of nowhere in Missouri. There, the hero had to confront a gang of local racketeers led by an authoritative bastard who allegedly founded the town and believed that everything there belonged to him. The aesthetics were almost entirely based on fights and rather brutal violence (the protagonist’s signature move was pulling out a caddis with his bare hands) with an admixture of sketchy traditionalist melodrama. By the way, in 2006, someone made a sequel about Dalton’s son, played by Jonathon Scheck, but it was not even a B movie, but a C or D movie, or further down the alphabet.

In the remake, Doug Liman, not as an artist but as a moviegoer, retained his love for B-movies. He cultivated a tremendous nostalgia for B-movies. In fact, he made the film for his uncles who grew up watching movies with Swayze and Chuck Norris (this is how some critics called the original Roadside Inn: the best version of the Chuck Norris movies), and for modern young men who grew up mostly on anti-masculine trends and were eager to try a manly delicacy. That is, Lyman did not rewrite the plot “with respect for women,” and he did not fashionably rewrite the male role to fit the heroine (the female bouncer in the roadside bar could have been played, for example, by Gina Carano or even Michelle Rodriguez). At the same time, the director invited not “someone” to play the main role, but an A-list star, who automatically added a higher class to the low genre.

Gyllenhaal portrayed Elwood Dalton, which is to say, also Dalton, but not the same Dalton. Accordingly, the plot has undergone some, but minor, changes. The bar, for example, moved to Florida, to the coast a few kilometers from Miami, so the atmosphere and mood became less provincial and more resort-like. And the character of the hero became more ironic (for example, after the first fight, he takes everyone he beat to the hospital with his own hands, so masculinity has acquired a nice comic politeness). The mostly completely new dialogues still retain some of the old, obviously banal, but warm and dear to the moviegoer’s heart, lines like “There are no winners in a fight.”

And speaking of subtle references, we can notice that Elwood Dalton once said that he was from Montana, and it is in Montana that the director of the original film, Rowdy Herrington, who has not been making films for a long time, currently lives. It’s also worth mentioning that Patrick Swayze played a psychologist in the cult science fiction film Donnie Darko, which made Gyllenhaal a celebrity and launched his big career.

The furious antagonist in the remake was portrayed by the furious Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, who fit perfectly into the “no brains, just brawn” format. And although some reviewers criticized the excessive and seemingly poor quality computer graphics in the fights, Lyman’s action definitely does not look artificial and painted. On the contrary, it seems realistic and stunt-like, with only a little bit of CGI varnished on top.

So the hype around Roadside Inn 2024 probably means the following: the audience is tired of fashion trends and misses old-fashioned patterns. What yesterday seemed like a relic of the past incapable of a comeback, today seems like a fresh breath of stale man.