“Armed with a black belt in karate and a Ph.D. in philosophy, Patrick Swayze …” — do we even need the rest of that sentence? Could the capsule summary of the original 1989 Road House append any predicate that wouldn’t be awesome? “Ups production at the local cardboard factory.” “Attends George H.W. Bush’s inauguration.” “Gets an airport shoeshine.” Yes, ditto, and I’m up for it. The actual movie pits Swayze against a crime lord’s hapless gang, but that storyline is almost beside the point. The picture is about Swayze’s ridiculous self-seriousness, his haircut, and his abs. It is, in other words, fun. Can director Doug Liman’s new, straight-to-Amazon Prime “reimagining” of the cult classic compete with that?
For the new film’s opening minutes, the answer is a solid maybe. We meet our hero, Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal), in an underground boxing club in which a local bruiser has just vanquished six straight challengers. When Dalton steps into the enclosure, silent and unprepossessing, the crowd sees a lamb being led to the slaughter. However, before the fight can start, the bruiser recognizes his foe and flees the scene. “Beats working,” Dalton tells an acquaintance in the parking lot later. With pockets stuffed with prize money, our protagonist has barely cracked a sweat.
Observing this introduction, I had a fantasy that Gyllenhaal’s character would throw no punches for the entire movie, relying instead on a shirtlessness even more impressive than Swayze’s to do its intimidating work. Alas, Liman’s film has nothing so subversive in mind. Soon enough, the blows start raining down, workmanlike and without so much as a glint of humor. The inheritor of none of Swayze’s flash, Gyllenhaal doesn’t even rip a villain’s throat out, as the original Dalton did to Marshall Teague 3 1/2 decades ago.
On the contrary, Gyllenhaal’s character is a man of simple, if brutal, martial tactics. A former UFC fighter who left the sport after killing an opponent, the updated Dalton prefers breaking fingers to spin-kicking drunk hoodlums through glass. The film’s action is essentially unchanged: Hired to clean up a rowdy bar, Dalton cracks some skulls and falls in love. But something critical is missing. Call it flair, winkingness, or cheese. In its absence, the new movie is a straight punch-out bloodfest with all the likability of a chipped tooth. Even its concessions to politics are half-hearted. “Race!” “Commercial real estate!” “Florida!” To watch Liman’s production is to see joylessness turned into its own genre.
As in 1989, the new Road House concerns the fate of a watering hole in need of a serious security upgrade. Dalton’s employer this time around is not businessman Frank Tilghman but Frankie (Jessica Williams), a happy-go-lucky 30-something with the funkiest liquor joint in the Keys. Pitched against the good guys are local blue-blood Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) and a psychopathic hatchet man played by real-life fighter Conor McGregor. Brandt wants the bar’s land to develop a yuppie paradise (and, implicitly, to rid the Keys of a black entrepreneur). McGregor’s Knox wants — well, it isn’t clear. The UFC star’s performance makes The Rock look like Daniel Day-Lewis.
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Other familiar elements are here as well. Visiting the hospital after a stabbing, Dalton meets a beautiful doctor (Daniela Melchior) who stitches him up and chides him for his lifestyle. A local storeowner catches Dalton’s eye and provides a link to a world beyond violence. In Liman’s hands, these plot points have been “reimagined” only insofar as the relevant roles, such as Williams’s Frankie, are now played by actors of color. There is an argument to be made that, say, a black Macbeth breathes thrilling life into our fusty classics. But Road House?! Were I a member of a racial minority, I might ask to be left out of that particular revision.
And what of Gyllenhaal himself, an Academy Award and Tony nominee who has, for the last half-decade, seemed dead set on destroying his career? Ambulance? The Covenant? Spider-Man? Give me a break. In part, we might simply blame the passage of time for the actor’s disappointing run. His best work, 2007’s Zodiac, was filmed nearly 20 years ago and made use of a boyishness that Gyllenhaal no longer possesses. Yet to watch the leading man’s latest project is to be confronted with a larger question: Is he really, right now, a better actor than Patrick Swayze was in 1989? Certainly, he looks the part: handsome, beefed-up, and as springy as a kangaroo. But something in the eyes is missing. Perhaps that “thing” is the confidence that his new movie has any right to exist at all.
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.