A Kick in the Teeth

Crafting a quality remake is hard. Yes, you get to build a story with some built in “brand awareness” as there was a film (or show, or whatever) that came before people will likely recognize and (hopefully) think of fondly when they go to see the new movie. You’re starting with a leg up, in a way, over an original idea since you can lock in that segment of the audience that knows of the original film and has some interest in a new version. It’s like a sequel, in a way, but without having to carry on the baggage of continuity of using the same actors.

With that said, you have to have a reason to make a remake. Simply capitalizing on the name isn’t enough if there isn’t some kind of vision behind it. While film remakes are nothing new (they’re been around since 1896 when George Melies remade Playing Cards) good, necessary remakes are far less common. For every good remake (such as site favorites like 1982’s The Thing and 1986’s The Fly) you get a dozen terrible remakes (2014’s Annie, 2006’s The Wicker Man, 2010’s The Karate Kid, et al). These are films that came along and managed to not only be bad movies in general but to also miss the whole point of the original films they were remaking.

A remake doesn’t have to be one-to-one with the original (case in point, 1998’s Psycho), but it should at least understand what worked about the original film and while people loved it so. The Thing managed to maintain the cold dread of the original while upping the scares and gore. The Fly tapped into the body horror of the original and then took it far deeper and farther. The issue with 2024’s Road House is that it doesn’t know what made the original special. That 1989’s Road House wasn’t a good movie but it was a delightful over-the-top cheese fest as only the 1980s could produce. Without that special mix, any film trying to copy the original was destined to fail.

Jake Gyllenhall stars as Dalton, a former (disgraced, as we eventually learn) UFC fighter who, in his last bout years ago, lost control of his rage and killed his opponent (for whatever reason the film feels the need to draw out this reveal of his backstory despite it, in the end, having little relevance to him as a character). Unable to fight in the big leagues anymore, Dalton has been bumming around back-alley fight clubs, running cons on other fights and making bank (his reputation being what it is, he can at least cause other fighters to run from the ring rather than, you know, get killed).

At one such bout, Dalton meets up with Frankie (Jessica Williams), the owner and operator of a roadhouse (called “the Road House” for dumb reasons) in Glass Key, Florida. She’s been having trouble with some people coming around, causing damage, trying to chase off her guests. She needs a bouncer who can clean the place up and won’t back down from a fight. Desperate for money, Dalton accepts, and that puts him in the world of Glass Key, dealing with a corrupt land developer, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), and his various goons. Dalton will have to fight for the Road House, and his life, if he’s ever going to make it out of this alive.

The Road House remake is a deeply flawed movie and that is largely because it doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. Say what you will about the original Road House (and I did in my review of it) but it at least knew it was a big, dumb, gore brawling movie. The 2024 Road House feels sanitized in all the wrong ways. It’s not as violent, not as brazen, not as sexy. Despite having a lead character that is a quite literal murderer, it does everything it can to make him cleaner and nicer. Hell, it even gives him a kid sidekick just to show he’s “a nice guy.” The film was to play like a family friendly version of Road House, at least right up to the point with a hulking, naked dude goes wandering through the film.

Tonally the film can’t ever settle. Is it a movie about a guy trying to redeem himself after he hit rock bottom? Is it a film about a guy that learns to connect with people through a kid, Charlie (Hannah Lanier), and a doctor love interest, Ellie (Daniela Melchior)? Is it even a film about a dude coming to a roadhouse, kicking ass and getting down and dirty? It’s sort of all of those but legitimately none of them because the film doesn’t really take the time to focus on any one part of the movie long enough to make it stick. All these ideas are there but none of them are given life or depth to feel like functional parts of the movie.

Reportedly the film has a troubled production, with director Doug Liman (of Swingers and Edge of Tomorrow fame, among other works) saying that Amazon took the film away from him at a certain point and reshot and re-edited parts without him. There were even some claims that A.I. was used to enhance the film. I don’t know about any of that, per se, but this does feel like a film that struggled from studio notes and reshoots. It’s an overworked, underbaked mess that never really finds itself, even when there are moment where you think the film could come together.

The best part of the film is Gyllenhall. His performance is simple, kind of a zenned out, surf-riding dude that wouldn’t seem out of place in The Big Lebowski. He’s a fighter that doesn’t want to fight, and he only took the roadhouse gig because he was desperate. Every fight he gets into (at least until the mid-way change of tone for the film) he at least tries to talk his way out of. He’s a nice guy stuck in a violent world, and Gyllenhall sells that well enough. I wouldn’t call it a great performance, but it’s certainly the best in the film.

The worst is the film’s true heavy, Conor McGregor as Knox. McGregor is a former UFC champ who has turned to acting and, if his performance here is any indication, the man should have stuck to fighting. He’s a one-note, obnoxious character. McGregor doesn’t so much act in this film as yell his lines loudly and put on a crazy face. Oh, and walk around naked more than once. The man certainly seemed to enjoy showing off his ass in the film as he does it enough. Knox supposed to balance out Dalton, to show the kind of person he could become without control, but McGregor’s performance is so bad the character never sells that plot device.

Not that the film really knows what to do with Dalton’s story regardless. The film drags out the reveal of what he did in the ring that fateful night, killing his foe, until the two-thirds mark. By then we’ve already gotten used to Dalton the way he is now, not the man he used to be, so that action, that murder in the ring, has no bearing on the story. The film drags it out too long and by the time it’s revealed it feels like Dalton couldn’t kill anyone even if he wanted to. He’s just not that kind of guy.

Which is what makes it even more jarring when he then goes on a murder spree, killing all the goons that get in his way. This is the place where the film really loses itself because Dalton stops feeling like Dalton anymore. The guy we’ve seen doesn’t align with the actions he’s doing, and neither the story not Gyllenhall’s performance are able to justify it. It’s so out of left field for the character (despite the backstory) that it would have been better if the film found any other way to deal with his problems. It just doesn’t work.

And then there’s the fact that even when the action is going on it doesn’t really work. Gyllenhall is capable enough but the film has to spend a lot of energy cutting around stunts and obscuring the stuntmen (that clearly don’t look like Gyllenhall), which drains the intensity from the action. It’s over-edited, over-produced, and it lacks the energy needed to really hit. The worst offender is the climactic fight between Dalton and Knox which is cut so weirdly, and with so much shaky action and bad edits, that you can hardly tell what’s going on at all.

This all gets back to the fact that the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. It can’t settle on its story, it can’t cohesively illustrate its character, and when it comes to the one thing it should be able to nail, its action, it can’t even get that right. This is just an utter mess of a film that never comes together, and in the end it would have been better if it just hadn’t tried at all. The original Road House isn’t a great movie, but it’s miles better than this overworked remake.