Road House 2024

Counter-Currents

1,352 words

I wanted to like it. Going in I told myself, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Give it a chance.” But nothing could prepare me for this big-buck adulteration.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Road House is similar in name only to Patrick Swayze’s Road House from 1989. It takes some of the latter’s key lines, themes, and characters only to rework them badly and bury them in a bucket of banality.

If you can’t run with the big dogs, don’t bust out the quote that “pain don’t hurt.” From start to finish, the Road House remake is a garish, overpriced hijacking of a cult classic. This version is almost insultingly derivative of the original (which, admittedly, was no Citizen Kane).

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Road House 1989 wasn’t great art. In a contemporary interview with Sam Elliott, who plays the main character’s bouncer mentor, Wade Garrett, he advised, “If you take it any more seriously than MAD Magazine, then you’re in trouble.” Nobody, and I mean nobody who has seen the original Road House has ever taken it for more than campy, predictable, comic-book level, butt-kicking fun. Except . . . you love Dalton (played by Patrick Swayze). You love his mentor, Wade Garrett, who calls Dalton mi hijo (my son) in this town bully-versus-good guy/loner dude matinee. Suspend reality, open a beer, and go with this cult classic. I’ve seen it at least 20 times.

In the original Road House, women’s honor is defended and thugs are vanquished. The tormented, lone wolf tai chi master with fabulous hair-flip anguishes over the fact that he can’t take on all the tyrants who deserve a roundhouse kick to the side of the face. The beatdowns are superhuman and far exceed what any mere mortal could endure, with the Joffrey Ballet-trained dancer Patrick Swayze delivering “nutcrackers” every bit as precise and graceful as the movements in Tchaikovsky’s ballet.

Lest one think that the original Road House is all fisticuffs, it’s not. From this B-grade flick is delivered a fabulous “moving forward in life” strategy from Dalton: “I want you to be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”

RH ’89 also had the good sense — or luck — to feature The Jeff Healey Band (“Angel Eyes”), a party house winner for any watering hole.

There are a couple of scenes in the original Road House that I’d have left out for their brief and unnecessary crudity, however. Okay, a mud bog race is not Talladega and isn’t trying to be.

The new Road House, on the other hand, is an $85 million, politically correct, ruthless, high-impact, garish imposition of woke politics in the form of art. Straight white people are brutal, brainless, privileged, and without conscience; black and brown people are brilliant, articulate, and “kept down.” The B-grade, “brewskis in the basement with the boys” charm of the original is completely lacking.

Dalton in the 2024 version lacks the heart of Swayze’s Dalton. This new version of Dalton, played by director Jake Gyllenhaal, is a ripped, scarred, lethal loner with a benign surface veneer and all the substance of floor vinyl. We could believe that Swayze’s Dalton had studied philosophy and was on a tormented crusade. We’re not sure that the self-destructive, directionless ex-MMA fighter Dalton played by Gyllenhaal has ever even read a soup can.

The new Dalton’s main enemy is a clichéd, tantrum-throwing, rich, white millennial brat who outsources his thuggery to a one-dimensional, robotic, real-life MMA maniac played by Conor McGregor. The violence is dark, vicious, and gratuitous — nothing like Swayze’s comic-book fights, which were over-the-top fun.

MMA madman Conor McGregor indeed delivers as a ranting, ripped, tattooed mercenary who walks into a bar — encountering no resistance, of course — with a golf club and busts the place up. To add insult to injury, it’s a redneck bar owned by a black woman in Florida. And this is only one of many diversity-casting hijackings.

The gods of political correctness must have vomited all over this script. The Double Deuce bar’s owner, who in the original is a middle-aged white guy from Missouri with a receding hairline named Tilghman (played by Kevin Tighe), is here recast as black actress Jessica Williams. Her character is named Frankie — the requisite, switch-hitter unisex appellative – and she is unconvincing as a black woman who runs a Florida seaside bar where white guys come to club each other into stew meat. Frankie is as quick on the comebacks and opinionated as MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Rednecks love that!

The owner of the auto parts shop in the original, Red — played by Red West, who was one of Elvis Presley’s original Memphis Mafia crew — has been recast as a precocious, “smarter than everyone else” black teenage girl with a pigtailed afro, the obligatory magic negro who is always a necessary vehicle for wisdom and knowledge in today’s media. She likewise has a gender-fluid first name: Charlie. The only way to make this diversity casting choice more ridiculous would have been to make the character a black veterinarian or machinery operator. Thus, two important roles from the original have been “culturally enriched” with compulsory African (and adjacent) recasting.

The character of Doc in the original is played by Kelly Lynch, who fills out a red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth dress that is yummy. Her feminine lissomness elicits the best line in the movie, which is delivered by Wade Garrett when he tells his protégé Dalton that she’s got “entirely too many brains to have an ass like that.” Doc in the new version is repackaged as a hard-edged Portuguese actress with all the sex appeal of a Hampton Inn housekeeper.

As for Dalton’s mentor, Wade Garrett, who was played by the iconic Sam Elliott in the original — he is completely absent from the remake. Of course they did away with the film’s father figure! I should be happy about this. If they had kept him, they would probably have cast him as a transgendered ex-football player akin to Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp.

Which brings us to the gender-amorphous, dykey bartender Laura, who is played by a gender-amorphous dykey actress named B. K. Cannon. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that — except for the fact she’s just another insertion of a lefty into a film that is trying too hard to be the cinematic equivalent of a Benetton ad. It’s as insane as remaking Snow White featuring a Latina as the title character, and with three blacks and an Asian among the seven dwarves.

Wait — they actually already did that, didn’t they?

One comes away from the remake not liking anyone in it very much. Still, you end up sticking around to see the bad guys burn, which is small consolation for having endured this dark, pyrotechnic imposter of the original.

I found the Road House remake barely watchable. I was only able to make it through it in the same way in which one would wade through endless tedium to see what happens to a group of Muslim terrorists who are playing chicken with a rock and a landmine. The inevitability of someone getting their comeuppance is the only thing that carries the viewers’ interest through the darkness of this savage, pointless spectacle. This is merely woke infiltration and a bastardized revision of something that white guys love.

Despite the $85 million budget, slick editing, elaborate stunts, impressive FX fight overlays, and pyrotechnics, the new Road House elevates the status of the 1989 original in the same way that today’s better-conditioned, pampered NFL players, in all their unwanted complexity, leave us longing for the NFL players who we grew up watching — and who had hearts.

There is no moment in Road House ’24 that could comfortably accommodate someone saying to Dalton, “I thought you’d be bigger.” This in fact makes the remake much smaller. Road House ’24 is an expensive confluence of predictable diversity casting with a dreary and uninspiring storyline that destroys all that we loved about the original. Pain don’t hurt, but the new Road House certainly does.