Road House (2024)
First screened and reviewed in March 2024
Director: Doug Liman. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor McPherson, Billy Magnussen, Daniela Melchior, Jessica Williams, Joaquim de Almeida, JD Pardo, Hannah Lanier, Kevin Carroll, Dominique Columbus, Lukas Gage, B.K. Cannon, Post Malone, Arturo Castro, Beau Knapp, Darren Barnet, Bob Menery, Travis Van Winkle. Screenplay: Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry, from a screen story by Anthony Bagarozzi, Chuck Mondry, and David Lee Henry (based on an earlier screenplay by David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin).VOR:②
Why this isn't a "1"? Because they took some casting risks? Because they didn't just xerox the original? Because I woke up happy?
Does anyone understand what Jake Gyllenhaal wants from his career? He often seems trapped in his own movies, as though you can guess which aspect or what potential got him interested enough to commit, before the foundations proved too crumbly or the execution too slipshod or neutered or tasteless for the damn thing to work. Jake's tried several times to anchor a character study of masculine trauma and/or traumatizing masculinity, like Southpaw or Stronger or Knuckle Sandwich or Rage Against the Machine, only two of which I made up. He's done his time with action movies destined for the ever-more-tragic Target DVD shelves, like the scrappy End of Watch and The Guilty and Everest and Ambulance, and while some have their devotees, none fully landed. You could understand if his commercial pulp was paying for his riskier acting stunts in Weird Art, but Nocturnal Animals and Velvet Buzzsaw and Enemy hardly seem like the kind of crown jewels that make the cash grabs worthwhile. I fully believe he's interested in ensemble work, but when I think back on Wildlife or Prisoners or Okja or the underrated Sisters Brothers, I remember other performers clearly and Jake barely at all. Nightcrawler is the closest he's come to convincing me he was in exactly the movie he wanted to be in, doing the work in the way he wanted to do it, and plenty of people agree. I personally wasn't that convinced by the movie or the performance, but they warrant respect.
You can start getting nostalgic about Jake's halcyon period, but when was that? The 00s were larded with Rendition and Jarhead and Prince of Persia and Day After Tomorrow and Moonlight Mile and the Brothers remake and Proof, some of them promising on paper, but all ersatz in different ways. Love & Other Drugs, a 2010 release, belongs by all other rights to this vintage. Even from this period, he is not always the strongest thing in his strongest movies (Brokeback, Zodiac). He IS peerless in Donnie Darko, which remains his best film, his most forceful characterization, and, I'd wager, the most expressive of something complicated in the actor's actual spirit. I'm not saying he's a borderline personality, susceptible to wormholes and paranoia! I'm saying he convinces me most when he plays disconcerting characters without hyperbolizing them into pitbulls or flaunting, as he often does, all the labor he's expended on his body or his plotted-out performance choices. One senses a fellow who can't quite fit together all the intriguingly multifarious pieces of himself, his abilities, his callings, the figure he cuts in public, and whoever he is in private. Donnie capitalized on that most tensely but also most poignantly.
No actor's résumé is a straightforward transcript of free will, but even granting that latitude, I still don't understand Gyllenhaal's decisions. I sense every time he's on Broadway that he wants to spend as much of his work life as possible on stage, but that option may or may not be viable. I truly apologize for going so hard on the guy, but I admit it's easier to think of myself as a fan when I'm not actually sitting in front of his movies, wanting them or him or both to aim higher or persuade more. That all of this can be true, yet he still has a much more interesting, even gratifying career than most of his male peer group tells you just what a dire point we've reached with 21st-century Hollywood stardom.
All of which brings us to Road House, which is at one level a Southpaw thing (hitting, bellowing, popping vessels, more hitting, redemption arc) and at one level an Ambulance thing (cops, sirens, ludicrous overstatement), and at one level a check-in about how Jake's shoulders, abs, and pecs are doing (they're doing great), and at one level a hat-tip to a former costar (Swayze, RIP), and at one level a nasty, artistically anonymous piece of junk that makes itself look worse the longer it goes. Road House 1.0, as I discovered yesterday, has more sweetness to its stupidity. In Swayze, it profited from a lead who seems to believe in exactly what he's doing even when the project is loony, and from a species of tasty/terrible dialogue and overall styling that only the 80s could deliver in quite that way. Road House 2.0 has its genial moments, and Jake seems to enjoy that frequency as long as he can stretch it out, but it's snarlier in its violence, simultaneously crowded and listless in its narrative. Gyllenhaal and Daniela Melchior are even less convincing in their romantic plotline than Swayze and Lynch were in theirs, which is astounding. The casting of MMA superstar, rabid Ugnaught, and walking rap sheet Conor McGregor (and what a peculiar, self-impressed walk it is!) is a producers' stunt that pays no creative dividends at all. He's terrible, and his cock-of-the-walk certainty that he's wonderful turned me further against the movie, a little like watching SNL open the hosting doors for Donald Trump in 2016. We all draw our lines in personal ways about whose careers we will or won't support (and I watched anyway, so joke's on me), but I guess in this case we're just gonna platform a raging sociopathic asshole in the interest of Road House, at best a marginally fun hang? For this we throw a lifeline to a serial marauder?
Some good news: the stunt team on Road House deserves whatever they got paid and more, and occasionally the movie finds some inventive ways to film and edit action. Some first-person vantage points, some 360° or even 540° camera whirls, exciting manipulations of sound and silence at especially ballistic or out-of-body moments. Occasionally, this Road House gets close to the cheerfully blockheaded absurdism of its Swayze-starring progenitor, as when a shipboard fistfight continues even after the boat has been bombed to bits and both participants are treading water, still jabbing away. That is to say, every once in a while, you can feel the skillful, kinetic, and witty direction that Doug Liman brought to the sublime Edge of Tomorrow.
But talk about someone else whose career I don't totally understand. There's not a lot of through-line to Liman's projects over the last 30 years, which is not that uncommon. Still, nothing in the decade before Edge or in the decade after it comes close to explaining how that one film is so superb. More confounding is that there's not a lot of through-line to Liman's direction even within Road House itself. The divergent impulses toward light character comedy and rote, unpleasant action reminds me of comparable problems in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but that movie had higher highs, and it was easier to discern what Pitt, Jolie, and Liman were going for in it. With Road House, I'm at much more of a loss. I can't explain how so many performances here are so totally listless, as though we're watching first-day rehearsals or even failed auditions (Williams, Melchior, Magnussen). A final standoff between Gyllenhaal and McGregor ends, I think, on a genuinely new gimmick and even a macabre new joke for this kind of scene: think "human voodoo doll." But the distinctiveness of that duel only plays up how run-of-the-mill and joyless so many (many many) of the other fisticuffs and faceoffs have been. Some sequences and passages have been constructed as if the intricacies of double-crosses and character dynamics are crucial; others suggest strongly that we shouldn't spend even one iota of energy thinking about plot. Sometimes the movie pushes hard, even too hard for laughs. Sometimes, the sense of humor goes AWOL for 10 minutes or more.
The weirdest thing in the movie and, if it weren't for McGregor's presence, the most casually gross is a harrowing backstory, teased out in fits and starts, for Gyllenhaal's character Dalton, a former UFC fighter. In the prior Road House, we knew that Swayze's Zen-practicing Dalton was haunted by his capacity for lethal violence in some kind of lover's-triangle situation that abruptly became a kill-or-be-killed crisis. Because Swayze was always good at selling gentleness, even when playing violent characters, and because that movie saw no need to illustrate his gruesome memories, we went with this information, at least as far as required by the utterly dopey script that contained it.
2024's Road House makes a totally different choice, flashing back with increasing frequency to the time that Gyllenhaal's Dalton went apeshit in the ring (sorry, the octagon) and waled away on the good friend he was fighting until the guy just expired. This becomes the occasion for Gyllenhaal to go Full Southpaw, eyes bulging and teeth grinding, and to raise again the question of why he's so drawn to these unhinged aggro moments in so many movies, unleashing a ferocity that far exceeds the needs of the synthetic products he's starring in. The fact that the dead friend/opponent was black, and that Dalton just cannot figure out the acidic spigot of fatal rage that overtook him, such that he murdered this guy with his bare hands, unleashes a whole set of discomfiting questions that this Road House, or probably any Road House, is not well-built to confront. And it makes some other character interactions and dialogues in the movie, right up through the final exchange about who is or isn't a hero, feel very strange indeed. And that's a nice word for how they feel, especially given who's talking.
Honestly, Road House shouldn't feel like a hard project for experienced pros to get a handle on. If anything, the risk might be that rebooting Road House is such a simple, straightforward remit that you might sleepwalk through the material or play down to it, in ways that your audience starts to sniff out or resent. What I sensed instead was a Road House that's just barely slick enough to get by as the most casual possible diversion, and yet so much in it feels mismanaged, unclear, unfinished, and more-than-casually off-putting. Why is there so much plot, and so little? Why is McGregor so indulged, preening and pummeling, preening and pummeling? Why is the girlfriend plot line such a notable shambles, and so prudish about sex and bodies when this is the only discernible ground for these characters' mutual attraction—and when the movie is so very un-prudish about bodies when it comes to violence? What is the whole Charlie/bookstore plot doing here? Why doesn't the movie look better, in general? Why is the sheriff called Big Dick? Is the titular road house a dive, or an upscale joint pretending to be a dive, and is Road House itself a dive, or a piece with stealth ambitions trying to seem like a dive? Was that suicide attempt at the beginning a semi-comic story point or very much not? Why is the near-deadly assault of a 13-year-old girl a key plot event in this movie, albeit offscreen, and handled kind of casually? When she next reappears, you wouldn't guess anything bad had happened to her (aka, the script wants you to forget itself as you watch). Is Dalton a silly hero of a silly movie, or a high-functioning vigilante with at least one dead black body in his past, though this is sort of couched as his trauma, not his victim's?
Why do I even have questions as I leave, of all things, Road House, and why such bad-aftertaste questions? Did Jake enjoy making it? Was it good for business, or fun to chill in the D.R., or a callback to middle-school slumber parties, or a recertification to casting agents in certain genres, or an exciting lure that fell apart on him midway through? Did he or did he not want to be in this film? Why did I want to watch it? Is there any point to these queries? Forget it, Jake, it's Road House. Grade:C–
