"Road House" (2024): review

L to R: Conor McGregor as Knox; Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton

[WARNING: spoilers.]

People will remember Patrick Swayze's "Road House" from 1989, a hilariously stupid movie with many accidentally funny one-liners, plenty of boozin' and fightin', with some quasi-Zen/Taoist/Stoic/pragmatist philosophy sprinkled in. It's the story of Dalton, who rambles into town, sets himself up in a farm loft by a local river, and gets in trouble with the tycoon-in-residence who, like a mafia boss, extorts all the local merchants. If the merchants fail to comply with the racket, he destroys their livelihoods through chaotic bar fights, firebombings, and—yes—monster trucks. Only Dalton stands in his way. The whole thing is tacky and unserious, and I'm here to tell you that 2024's "Road House," while having very little to do with the plot of the 1989 movie, carries that silly spirit into the twenty-first century.

Directed by Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity," "Edge of Tomorrow") and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, "Road House" is still the story of Dalton, but instead of being something akin to Kwai Chang Caine from "Kung Fu," as Swayze's Dalton was, this version of Dalton is a champion MMA brawler—a quiet person who's slow to anger but, once he gets angry, becomes a force of nature. He's also got a dark past, having killed a friend during a championship fight in the octagon, with no one outside the event understanding why he was so brutal when his friend was already down for the count.

When we meet Dalton (Gyllenhaal), he's about to enter a local ring to fight a flabby champ,* but when Dalton steps into the ring and takes off his shirt, everyone—including the flabby champ—recognizes who Dalton is, and the champ, who had just won six bouts in a row against even flabbier locals, turns yellow and begs off the fight, leaving the fight purse to Dalton in return for not being royally fucked up. A lady named Frankie (Jessica Williams), watching the proceedings, finds Dalton as he's walking back to his car. Frankie tells him she's the owner of a bar in the Florida Keys called the Road House—deliberately spelled as two words. Her bar has been having trouble with people who constantly come in and stir shit up; the bar has already run through several bouncers; no one ever stays, and Frankie is desperate. Dalton initially says no to her offer of $5000 a month, but after he has a scary moment involving an oncoming train, he comes to his senses and makes his way down to Glass Key, part of the Florida Keys.

Once in Glass Key, Dalton befriends Charlie (Hannah Lanier), a local teen girl who works in a bookstore with her dad. In a meta/prophetic moment, Charlie fancifully draws a parallel between Dalton's arrival in town and some old Western novels where a heroic stranger appears and sets things right. Now working as a bouncer, Dalton gets into a tussle with a bunch of local bikers led by the surly Dell (JD Pardo, who was one of the cooler characters in "The Terminal List"). As the story unfolds, we find out that the people harassing the Road House, including Dell and others, are trying to scare Frankie away from her property so that rich scion Brandt (Billy Magnussen) can develop her property into a coastal resort. On Glass Key, old families are well established and have a lot of pull: they control businesses and at least part of the local police force, run by the corrupt sheriff known locally as Big Dick (Joaquim de Almeida). All of these bad guys see Dalton as in the way, and since the local muscle hasn't been able to scare Dalton out of Glass Key, Brandt's father, who is in prison, calls in muscle from Europe: an Irish fighter named Knox (true-life MMA champ Conor McGregor in his first movie role). Complicating matters is that the corrupt sheriff's daughter, Ellie (Daniela Melchior of "The Suicide Squad" fame), an ER doc, is starting to fall for Dalton.

In the 1989 film, Dalton rolls into town and ends up dispensing justice to all the bad guys, and the town is liberated from the oppression of Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). It's a simple story told in primary colors. In the 2024 film, the ending is a bit more murky and complicated: Dalton doesn't turn out to be the hero some people wanted him to be, but as Charlie cheerfully notes at the end of the film, he's not the villain, either.

Is "Road House" supposed to be a comedy? There are plenty of laugh lines, and Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dalton as a generally taciturn-but-likable fellow. Conor McGregor's Knox looks far bigger than McGregor normally looks when he's in the octagon, and McGregor—who, it must be said, can't act—plays the role with a cheerfully psychotic zaniness. Knox is merely hired muscle in this movie; he does what his boss tells him to do, but Knox has a weird dynamic with Dalton: he starts off as his enemy but, by the end, he almost seems to respect his opponent, having recognized a fellow berserker, a kindred spirit. With a little more tweaking to the writing, this aspect of "Road House" could have made the movie much more interesting. The movie's humor, though, is punctuated by a sort of deadly seriousness, but this may have been an homage to the 1989 film, which starts off fairly comical before becoming extremely dark when Patrick Swayze rips out the throat of Jimmy Reno (Marshall Teague), the other accomplished martial artist in town.

The romantic subplot with Ellie didn't feel as if it were going anywhere, and I didn't sense much chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Melchior. Dalton's interactions with fellow bar employees, his boss, and the locals, by contrast, felt natural and wholesome. The screenwriters definitely invested time in the world-building, although I found the villains' motives to be shallow at best, and Dalton's interactions with the bad guys were all very one-note.

In all, this was a movie that had potential, and it was hard to figure out just what sort of tone it was trying to strike. Was it a reboot of Swayze's movie, or just a remake? The plot of the 2024 film is so different from the original film's that I'm thinking this has to be a reboot. The script also showed occasional flashes of brilliance, and Gyllenhaal, who is a talented actor, delivered his lines in a wry tone that reminded me a bit of Toby Maguire. Conor MacGregor's first outing as an actor was awkward at best, but he obviously had fun in the role, and it must've been frustrating for him to play a heavy who loses to Jake Gyllenhaal. (That, or McGregor is just a very, very good sport.) So, as I feel about Keanu Reeves, I see Conor McGregor as a good physical actor but a terrible dramatic actor. He has potential, and if he snags more film roles, his acting ability can only improve. Perhaps he'll follow the path of fellow MMA star Gina Carano although I hope McGregor doesn't allow himself to go soft as Carano has done.

Another actor deserving mention is Hannah Lanier as the teenage Charlie. Lanier plays Charlie with an agreeable naturalness; I see good things happening in her future, and I liked her Charlie's dynamic with Gyllenhaal's Dalton. Charlie's dad Stephen (Kevin Carroll) doesn't get much screen time, but he makes a positive impression. Special props to Joaquim de Almeida, one of my favorite actors: his gravelly-voiced Sheriff Big Dick is a vile turd of a cop, but he loves his daughter. De Almeida plays the role with just the right level of cruelty. Billy Magnussen as Brandt isn't a very imposing presence, and he doesn't inspire much fear. His father, whom we only hear as a voice calling Brandt from prison, sounds a lot scarier. Arturo Castro plays one of the biker-gang members following Dell around, and as the timid, talkative Moe, he provides a good measure of comic relief.

The Florida Keys, as a setting, were practically their own character in the film. I appreciated the cinematography, especially the one scene where Dalton and Ellie go on a date, taking a boat out to a sunken sandbar and enjoying a picnic lunch in calf-deep water. I wish the two had had better chemistry together; that could have been a truly romantic scene.

Overall, "Road House" is a mishmash of comic and dramatic. Like the 1989 film, it's a weird fusion of silly and serious. The Dalton we meet in this version isn't quite as pure, self-possessed, and philosophical as Swayze's Dalton (nor does he have the bouncer's background of Swayze's Dalton), but he knows how to crack a joke, and Gyllenhaal plays the role with feeling. Elements of the story border on the ridiculous and the preposterous, with plenty of loose ends and unexplored legal implications. By the time Dalton rolls out of town at the end, the old, established families of Glass Key are still in power, as is corrupt sheriff Big Dick. As for loose ends: even the brutal Knox, who is defeated by Dalton, gets a mid-credits scene in which he fights his way out of a hospital wearing one of those ass-exposing hospital gowns. The hospital escape is played for comedy, but didn't Knox kill one or more people earlier, and wasn't he thus wanted for murder? At least one main villain dies, but we're left with the impression that this doesn't change much. And the biggest question, after all of this chaos and drama, is: will the Road House survive? Maybe, but Brandt's crime family isn't the only one developing land in the Keys. Predators abound. The story isn't over. And yet... despite the movie's numerous flaws and extremely messy ending, it's hard to hate because, like the 1989 story, it's good, stupid fun, not to be taken too seriously.

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*The flabby champ was played by rapper Post Malone. Here's a short video of him paying homage to the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith. He's got a good voice. And as for acting in this movie... for the short amount of time he was on screen, he wasn't bad at all. He should've given Conor some lessons.