It would be easy to dismiss a new Road House – the shoes left by a gritty, sweaty Patrick Swayze in the pulpy 1989 action film are hard ones to fill; sequels and remakes tend to tip the fine balance of good-bad that defined so many films from that period into straight-up bad. Plus, the Road House remake from The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is (controversially) bypassing theaters and headed straight to streaming via Amazon Prime Video – by now, given the deluge of disposable content, a dubious distinction for quality.
The straight-to-streaming release plan, however intentional, is indeed a bummer, as Liman’s rowdy, campy remake both looks and sounds more expensive and textured than what we’ve come to expect from digital releases. This Ultimate Fighting Championship-inflected Road House, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a brass-knuckled bouncer with a tortuous past, is meant for the big screen, as evidenced by the hoots and hollers at its SXSW premiere. Relocated from honky-tonk Missouri to the Florida Keys, the new Road House, written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry (who collaborated on the story with original screenwriter David Lee Henry), is an entertaining and visceral, if at times unwieldy, romp of scene-chewing trash talk and smackdowns.
