Jake Gyllenhaal and Doug Liman Bounce Into a Chaotic Blast
DIRECTOR: DOUG LIMAN/2024
We all know no one asked for a remake of Road House.
On paper, this update finds little new to explore since Patrick Swayze bounced bars outside Kansas City with Sam Elliott. It repeats most of the same plot beats, and it finds plenty more connections to the 1989 fan favorite. Dalton still drinks black coffee, there’s a business named Double Deuce, and a special brand of throat injury appears. You may be able to take Road House out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the band playing behind a beer-soaked cage out of Road House.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is a former UFC fighter-turned-drifter when Frankie (Jessica Williams) finds him. Her bar’s business has languished since a rough crowd started terrorizing the place, and every bouncer she’s hired has bailed. Since her cash speaks his language, Dalton heads to the Florida Keys to free The Road House from the motorcycle-saddled gang trashing it. But since we wouldn’t have a movie if he was only facing off against bored hoodlums, he discovers these goons are just the tip of the iceberg of crime controlling the community. If only they knew just how many people they’d need to make it a fair fight against Dalton.
Thank goodness Gyllenhaal seems to be losing interest in prestige. No one can question his Oscar-nominated talent, but the more often he loses his cool, the more I can’t resist his charms. Yes, I am once again imploring you to hop on 2022’s Michael Bay joyride Ambulance, in which Gyllenhaal’s bank robber screams “THIS IS CASHMERE!” in a fit of rage. (In the moments I’m not interested in prestige, I’ll confess it’s one of my favorite line readings in the history of cinema.) But I’m also advocating for his eccentric zoologist in 2017’s Okja (his last project with any Oscar buzz), his narcissistic Spider-man nemesis, and his bonkers musician in John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch. Even his take on a soldier fighting the Taliban in last year’s The Covenant is better described as manic than determined. Gyllenhaal is best when he’s a lil’ crazy, and this Road House is even more fun than the original because it embraces that.
One-upping (or perhaps quadruple-upping) Gyllenhaal’s crazy: real-life UFC fighter Conor McGregor, making his film debut. He enters the film naked as the day he was born, and somehow that’s not his wildest moment. His erratic heavy is the apex physical threat for the crook bankrolling him, Billy Magnussen’s petulant nepo baby. Their cartoonish villainy is so delightfully over-the-top that they (and scene stealer Arturo Castro) push Road House into comedy territory. This remake is bloodier than Patrick Swayze’s, which spent more energy reminding us his Dalton was tortured, but it’s also much sillier. No disrespect to Swayze, but this tone makes way more sense than the melodrama his performance brought.
Because he has no interest in self-seriousness, director Doug Liman finds new twists on the moves he found in his action breakout, The Bourne Identity. Action set at sea? Everyday objects turned weapons? Creative handheld camera work? He knocks these all of those out of the park again, though this time he’s thrown in a crocodile and a Post Malone cameo for good measure. No one asked for a remake of Road House, so how did we get so lucky with this chaotic blast?