There are two major problems with the new remake of Road House, though fortunately or frustratingly – maybe both – they have almost nothing to do with the film. The first is that it has been sent straight to Amazon Prime Video, when it obviously belongs in the cinema, with roomfuls of strangers wincing in unison at every splintered and/or minced appendage.
The second is that it only barely qualifies as a remake of Road House in the first place. Yes, it concerns a charismatic drifter with a past – here played by Jake Gyllenhaal – who ends up protecting a rag-tag community from a local kingpin and his goons. But this is also the plot of countless classic westerns, from Shane to Pale Rider: all that set the 1989 original apart from those is it took place in then-present-day small-town Missouri, and rather than a Remington or Colt, Patrick Swayze preferred martial arts.
At times while watching this new version, I found myself wondering if writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry had initially come up with a standalone script of that general type – before someone in a development meeting said, “Hang on, isn’t this a bit like that popular 80s film where Swayze goes around with his shirt off all the time?”, and from out of the ether rang a ghostly ker-ching. In other words, this is Road House-the-sort-of-remake which, with a few adjustments, needn’t have been one at all. But the branding will doubtless draw a larger audience to a film that will repay their curiosity with crunchy panache.
Gyllanhaal’s Dalton, like Swayze’s, is a mixed martial artist – though his past on the MMA circuit has left him with a body less lithe than shredded, all crinkle-cut abs and shoulders like broken Easter eggs. At a clandestine brawl in a barn, he’s hired by Jessica Wiliams’s Frankie to work as a bouncer at her Florida watering hole – a loveable dump which Ben Brandt, Billy Magnussen’s mad-eyed property baron, is just itching to bulldoze.
Dalton spends his evenings flattening the henchmen that Brandt sends his way, though at first he’s nice enough to drive them to the hospital afterwards. In a fight, he’s by turns apologetic and genial – traits Gyllenhaal makes hugely appealing and amusing – and as in the original, his adversaries-slash-victims are all vividly sketched. (The one with good manners is a particular comic masterstroke.)