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If Nicholas Sparks, that great peddler of sun-soaked honeysap coastal romance, decided to direct an action movie, it might look something like the first hour of Road House (Amazon, March 21). The film, a remake of the rollicking 1989 Patrick Swayze picture, introduces itself sweetly, giving the audience a tour of a friendly Florida Keys town and its one-line-character-description locals. The small-towners are tribal but kind, welcoming newcomer strongman Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) with wryly raised eyebrows but open arms.
It’s all very nice, complementing Dalton’s relaxed, polite way of moving through the world. Sure, he’s a former MMA brawler with a troubled past (though a slightly less graphic past than Swayze’s version). But he’s so cute and affable. And those island breezes are blowing, and the band’s wailing away at the Road House bar (and grille, I’m assuming), so who cares if Dalton has to break up a little fussin’ and a-fightin’ pretty much every night? Dalton is presented, in all his solid but tender masculinity, much in the same way that Ryan Gosling is in The Notebook, or Channing Tatum in Dear John, or Zac Efron in The Lucky One. They’re all lightly wounded men who are both heroes and objects of loving concern in their cozy Southern communities.
But that whole thing isn’t really director Doug Liman’s deal. He’s a flashy, snarky kineticist who infuses his best work with hard-edged humor. (Even the tight, unadorned hand-to-hand combat of The Bourne Identity was kind of funny.) Thus Road House, written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, gradually toughens up, though without losing its playful brio.
What a surprisingly agreeable Affair, this wholly unnecessary rehash of a 35-year-old curio. Road House suffers from some decidedly modern ailments: it often looks washed-out, and the special effects are cheaply rendered by computers. (Back in the day, there were actual speed boat stunts. There could be again!) But even that flimsiness comes with its own kind of wink. Liman is not trying to make terribly credible art here. We are only meant to make merry orbit around its violence, just as the Road House patrons do.
Much of the movie’s charm rests on its lead. Gyllenhaal doesn’t have the same warm twinkle in his eye that Swayze always used to such lovely effect, but he makes do with the rest of his elastic face. He can go from weary to wary in an instant, his wide mouth curling up or drooping at the edges as Dalton assesses a situation’s severity. Gyllenhaal has done a lot of macho or otherwise gruff stuff in recent years, in search of some balance, I suppose, to his more sensitive work in things like Nightcrawler, or Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway. (A stage performance for the ages, truly.) I would love to see Gyllenhaal work softer most of the time, but I suppose that Road House is a kind of compromise. There is, at least, an accessible strain of vulnerability here, even if Dalton is a near-Terminator in his impervious ability to do harm.
In the film, Dalton goes toe to toe with some local mooks working for the bratty son of a petty crime lord, a boat-loving ponce played with effective slime by Billy Magnussen. The main comedy of the film is the repetitive action of Dalton calmly dispatching, and embarrassing, the many goons who come his way. It is, as ever, good fun to see a procession of swaggering oafs shocked by an underestimated stranger’s prowess, and I happily would have watched the same thing happen again and again until the end credits rolled.
But the movie gods demand some actual adversarial conditions, and so enters Conor McGregor, a famed real-life MMA fighter making his film debut. He plays a ruffian hired by the gang to get rid of Dalton once and for all—the movie’s physical stakes shift quite rapidly from nasty but cartoonish beatings to actual murder. If there are people out there who have long yearned to see Jake Gyllenhaal fight Conor McGregor (much as people want to see Jake Paul fight people, I guess), then they ought to be satisfied. But the movie loses its cocky little strut when Dalton is actually up against a fellow immovable object. I wanted to see Dalton bounce and thrash along unscathed—here’s a rare film that maybe doesn’t need any real conflict.
Or maybe it’s just the McGregor of it all that’s a turn-off. He goes for gonzo and comes up illegible, doing little to brighten up his dark public image. His character is supposed to disrupt the easy idyl of the film—otherwise populated by harmless dopes and good-hearted folks played by Jessica Williams, Daniela Melchior, and Lukas Gage—so he is, in essence, doing his job. But he drowns out the music, harshes the mellow. His silliness is synthetic, while the rest of Road House comes pretty close to the bare-knuckle real thing.
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