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“Road House” also helped to further solidify the rising Swayze’s stardom, with many of the late actor’s fans holding Dalton as one of his best roles. The original cast was filled to the brim with ‘80s stars like Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, and Keith David, as well as wrestler-turned-actor Terry Funk as one of Brad Wesley’s (Ben Gazzara) numerous henchmen. It hasn’t been revealed if any of the surviving actors from Rowdy Herrington’s action film will show up for the remake, but this new version of Road House has a cast that’s nothing to laugh at. His features—the resolute jawline, those eyebrows like two thick slashes, that set of enormous anime-character eyes—haven’t slackened or softened. Gyllenhaal and Swayze were friends, and his performance here honors Swayze's without in any way parroting it, in a movie that’s a model of what a remake can be.
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Instead of a tony NYC nightclub, we kick off in Anywhere, USA’s underground fight club circuit, where Frankie (Jessica Williams) is looking to hire some out-of-town help. She’s been tipped off that the heavily tattooed slugger (yes, that is indeed Post Malone) wiping the floor with all comers may be the person she’s looking for. The person who attracts her attention, however, is the mystery man in the hoodie who’s just entered the makeshift ring. “Shrinking” star Jessica Williams, who confirmed to Variety last summer she’d be joining the cast, plays the roadhouse owner.
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As Liman and screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry navigate the waters of remaking a film like Road House, it illustrates precisely what is at stake in these kinds of endeavors. In spite of a few flashes of technical brilliance in its action sequences and a few tries made by its cast, this rebuilt Road House stands as a testament to just how difficult it is to capture lightning in a bottle. Gyllenhaal is here made to navigate a character who, despite a backstory crafted for complexity, comes across one-dimensionally. That’s not for want of trying on Gyllenhaal’s part, but rather the result of a script that never digs deep enough for the audience to fully explore or exploit the depth of Dalton’s inner turmoil. The result is a performance that feels removed from the emotional stakes at play and makes Dalton more of a caricature than a three-dimensional figure. Central to the movie is Gyllenhaal’s Dalton, a former UFC brawler grappling with his past.
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After Dalton meets Ellie (Daniela Melchior), a reprise of Kelly Lynch’s doctor-slash-romantic-interest from the original, Road House slips into a groove. The electric blue of Florida’s keys provide a fresh, picturesque backdrop to a lot of B movie pulp, but the rest is properly familiar. Once again, a particularly loathsome rich prick, played by a deep-in-the-douchebag-pocket Billy Magnusson, is behind all of the troublemaking. Once again, an alpha brute in the form of Knox (Conor McGregor) is brought in to take the hero down.
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Road House 2's Post Malone Return Can Fulfill The 1 Big Scene Missing From Amazon's 2024 Remake - Screen Rant
Road House 2's Post Malone Return Can Fulfill The 1 Big Scene Missing From Amazon's 2024 Remake.
Posted: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 12:45:00 GMT [source]
He had been an Ultimate Fighting Championship star until he snapped and pummelled an opponent to a pulp—a career-ending trauma that still haunts his dreams. Now he lives out of his car and is trying to earn money by signing up for freelance fights. But even the toughest opponents (including one played by Austin Post, a.k.a. the rapper Post Malone) tend to forfeit in fear. Directed by (I kid you not) Rowdy Herrington and shepherded to life by super-producer Joel Silver, the original Road House has a bad reputation, one that it frankly deserves. The high concept—a man so good at bouncing that he’s literally famous in bars across the nation—is ludicrous.
Cast & Crew
And who needs it when you’ve got Doug Liman directing the whole thing? Robert Oppenheimer of lunatic action set pieces (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Edge of Tomorrow” to name a few). The original Road House famously saw Swayze’s James Dalton agree to leave his gig as a “cooler” at a New York City bar to take on a job as the head of security for a Jasper, Missouri bar with a bit of image problem. The remake, however, will leave the “Show Me State” and be set at a similar establishment down in the Florida Keys, according to Variety. Despite being outnumbered, Dalton’s fighting prowess means Brandt’s henchmen stand little chance against him. However, the plot thickens with the entry of Knox (Conor McGregor), a merciless mercenary.
Casting
Swayze in particular is a fascinating casting choice for the role, bringing his trained dancer’s physicality to the ass-kicking contest and winning over and over again. Lynch is one of the few humans alive at the time who could hold up her end of a nude scene with a Swayze in that condition. Elliott, meanwhile, has had every woman I know who’s watched this movie reacting like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon.
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The first Road House flopped in theaters, but found a now-legendary new life on cable and VHS. This new Road House appears at a time when so much of our entertainment has been shrunk down to a manageable size. The energetic but dim remake of “Road House,” directed by Doug Liman, is hardly the picture to settle the question, much less inspire any new ones. But there’s a poignancy to the sight of Gyllenhaal, now forty-three and shredded to the max, paying tribute to his late former screen partner.
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At the Road House, Dalton fends off a motorcycle gang working for local crime boss Ben Brandt and personally drives the injured thugs to the hospital, where he meets Ellie, a doctor who tends to his injuries. Staying in Frankie's disused houseboat, Dalton mentors the other bouncers and becomes popular with the locals. After an attempt on his life by gang leader Dell, Dalton finds him lying in wait at his houseboat. He throws Dell overboard but is unable to save him from being killed and eaten by a crocodile. It doesn’t sound like this film will have any time loops, or highly-trained sleeper agents with spotty memories, but there’s a lot from his past that Liman could bring to the table with his next feature film. If this is the first you are hearing about the Road House remake, or perhaps you read about it but thought it was too good to be true, stick around, because we’re about to break down everything we know about the upcoming reimagining.
Ben Gazzara (of The Big Lebowski and the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof fame) plays the real-estate developer and organized crime boss out to stop him from cleaning up the joint. The mixed martial arts community had a lot more eyes on it in early March 2023, when Jake Gyllenhaal made a couple of appearances in the lead-up and during UFC 285 in Las Vegas to film scenes for the upcoming movie. The first took place the day before the event when the actor, in character, took part in a weigh-in, as seen in a video shared by the official ESPN MMA Twitter account. When we meet former UFC fighter Dalton (Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal), he’s no longer fighting professionally and is flirting with the idea of ending of his life.
In an unsurprising concession to our era of instant gratification, Gyllenhaal’s Dalton begins hurting people a lot sooner than his predecessor did. He does still endeavor to be nice, though, and it’s amusing when he brings a group of troublemakers outside, teaches them all a well-earned lesson, and then drives them to the hospital. Yet to come are wounds that no doctor can treat, some of them inflicted by boats and others by bombs. He wisely shoots the bar brawls in mostly long, uninterrupted takes, moving the camera in synch with the actors and cutting more for clarity than sensation.
This might seem heavier than you’re expecting but Dalton’s brief low moment is well-calibrated. Swayze’s Dalton was also haunted by his past mistakes but that film’s lighter atmosphere isn’t conducive to too much emotionality. Since Liman’s film, with a script by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, streamlines some of the original “Road House” campiness, there’s some atmospheric wiggle room for Gyllenhaal’s Dalton to show us what he’s feeling and to sit in it. But Road House is known as the best bad movie of all time because of the considerable chops involved in making it. Romantic leads Swayze and Kelly Lynch were coming in hot off sexy performances in the smash hits Dirty Dancing and Cocktail, and they look every inch the babes they’re supposed to be.
Enraged, Dalton kills one of the thugs responsible and captures a sheriff's deputy making a large delivery of Brandt's illicit cash, framing the deputy for the murder and taking the money. The sheriff soon informs Dalton that Brandt has kidnapped Ellie and will exchange her for the money. While a production start date has not been set, MGM higher-ups reportedly see the project as a priority for the studio. No deals have been signed with Gyllenhaal or Liman yet, though the two are in active talks.
Struggling to get by on his reputation, Dalton catches the eye of Frankie (Jessica Williams), who owns a roadhouse in the picturesque Florida Keys. She recruits him as her new bouncer, aiming to protect her cherished establishment from a ruthless gang under the command of the local criminal overlord, Brandt (Billy Magnussen). In the era of action films like John Wick, the bar for adrenaline-fueled entertainment has been set high.
He’s polite to a fault, asking an assortment of creeps about their insurance coverage and proximity to the nearest hospital before beating the tar out of them—this is the source of much of the film’s droll (yes, droll) sense of humor. Billy Magnussen shines as the Gazzara-style villain, a flop-sweating, smarmy scion of a rich criminal who comes across like a long-lost Trump son. “Road House is the story of one bouncer’s quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney. In this action landmark, Swayze plays Dalton, a “cooler” (head bouncer in charge) with a philosophy degree from NYU and a new gig at a Missouri hellhole.
In both films, Dalton and Doc engage in a type of instalove, where the audience isn’t privy to too much of the couple getting to know each other and growing closer. But it becomes more of a problem in the 2024 version, as female lead Daniela Melchior (“Fast X,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”) delivers a slightly unexpressive and serious performance. My favorite performance is given by a hungry crocodile who makes short work of one of the more annoying members of the cast and gives the movie some authentic Florida flavor. Even so, Gyllenhaal's Dalton feels like less of a pacifist than Swayze's, and he's not afraid to stir up trouble.
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