Road House movie review: Jacked-up Jake Gyllehaal’s charms are just enough to keep Prime Video’s action remake afloat
Jake Gyllenhaal in a still from Road House, directed by Doug Liman.
In many ways, director Doug Liman’s re-imagining of the 1980s cult hit Road House can be seen as a companion piece (and low-key rebuttal) to the many machismo-drenched Indian action movies that we’ve recently seethed at.
At one point in the first act, the hyper-violent protagonist’s love interest, a doctor, declares that she’s fed up with rage-filled maniacs clogging up her ER room after nightly brawls. And towards the end, a chirpy child assures him that while he isn’t the hero of this story, he most certainly isn’t the villain either.
Played by Jake Gyllenhall, Elwood Dalton is what our Bollywood stars would describe as a ‘grey character’. He uses violence as an answer to pretty much every problem, and God knows he seems to walk into them. When we first meet him, Dalton is killing time by participating in some kind of underground fight league; this opening scene exists more or less to establish how formidable he is. A brawler played by Post Malone of all people practically pees himself at the thought of taking him on in a ring.
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But Dalton is also a man with a dark past, which we learn about in due course of time. He lives out of a suitcase, isn’t tied down to a place or people, and gladly accepts an offer to move down to the Florida Keys and work as a bouncer at a beachside bar prone to attracting the worst kind of criminals every night.
This – being approached by a woman and not resisting her offer – instantly separates the new Road House from the Patrick Swayze original, which, in all honesty, remains ridiculously unwatchable despite what its cult of fans might tell you. In that movie, Swayze’s character was openly dismissive of the gig, which was offered to him not by a pretty young Black woman but by a middle-aged white man.
