We delve into this Amazon produced remake of a fan favorite: ROAD HOUSE. We offer our take on this movie without the nostalgia glasses that many may have, as Brian missed the original film entirely, and Nathan watched it just before jumping into this new iteration.
We start the episode giving a rundown of director Doug Liman’s filmography, then jump into the film (with spoilers for both this one and the original throughout). We’ll explore the characters, the acting, the action and visual effects, all set against the backdrop of what could effectively be a “direct to video” film starring one of our generation’s greatest actors.
Road House (2024)
directed by: Doug Liman
starring: Jake Gyllenhaal – Daniela Melchior – Billy Magnussen – Jessica Williams
genres: thriller – action
runtime: 121 minutes
Transcript (via Apple)
*not 100% accurate
Hi there, welcome back to The Reel Film Chronicles podcast.
As always, I’m Nathan.
And I’m Brian.
And in this week’s very special episode, we’re going to be taking a look at a little film called Road House.
Road House, 2024.
Not Road House 1989 with Patrick Swayze, right?
This is a full out remake directed by Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Swayze’s character, I think, the lead character.
Dalton.
This one just hit with Amazon Prime straight to, I don’t want to say straight to video, but that’s basically kind of what it was.
Yeah, I think Doug Liman, I saw his post, I think it was on social media, somewhere online about, I was really bummed he wanted this to go to theaters.
He thought it was his best work, and he was really, really proud of it.
And there was something going on behind the scenes, and Amazon ended up releasing it straight to their platform instead of going to theaters first.
So I know there was a little bit of behind the scenes drama with the director and Amazon there.
But it did end up dropping directly to Amazon Prime and skipping a theatrical run entirely.
Yeah, it is what it is.
I mean, I feel like I probably would not have gone out to see this in theaters if it went to theaters.
So this is one where I’m kind of satisfied with its direct to streaming approach, but I’m sure everyone would be a little bit different.
It would be kind of nice to see this maybe on the big screen amongst a crowd of people who are also kind of like into the movie, right?
Yeah, I think it would…
It might have benefited from the energy of the crowd watching it together, but I don’t think there’s anything that you’re missing kind of visually not seeing this on the big screen.
It was not like a big screen experience, really, like in terms of like, you know, we talked about Dune 2 recently.
I like that’s like, it’s made for the big screen, but something like Road House, I think if you watch it on your TV at home, it’s like, I don’t think you’re missing anything in terms of, you know, of the cinematic elements, but maybe you’re missing out on the crowd energy, which may have contributed to or enhanced the viewing pleasure of this type of movie.
Spoiler warning, if you’re familiar with our podcast, we don’t really hold back on spoilers right from the beginning.
So consider this your spoiler warning.
If you haven’t seen Road House, maybe go check it out and then come back to the podcast.
Or stay tuned, you know, if it’s not like crazy spoilers in this movie, I don’t think that we’re necessarily going to get into.
But before we jump into this movie, I thought it might be kind of interesting to just do a quick run through of Doug Liman’s filmography.
I don’t think I even realized old Doug here had made this movie until the movie started.
And I saw his name there.
I’m like, oh, Doug from Born Identity.
I mean, to me, that’s like the movie An Edge of Tomorrow.
It’s one of my favorite movies or live, die, repeat, depending on where you land in the title.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
I wouldn’t.
I wouldn’t got so messy.
It’s just just brutal.
But I didn’t even realize this going back.
One of his first movies was Swingers.
Yeah, I was surprised I hadn’t made that connection.
It was it back with Vince Vaughn and what’s his John Favreau?
Favreau was like John Favreau, like their first film, wasn’t it?
I think that they had written, I think.
Let’s do a quick check.
If only there were some way to check this, some kind of worldwide information network.
Yeah, John Favreau has writing credit.
So that’s probably one of his first movies, my guess.
I mean, I think both of us love that movie way back when.
And it’s still a good one to go back to.
It’s kind of fun.
He followed Swingers up with Go.
I’m not sure if you saw that, but…
I’ve never seen it.
No, have you?
Many, many years ago.
I have this odd memory of watching it.
And I think some family were over, like extended family were over.
And one of them came downstairs when I was watching it.
And it was a particularly spicy scene on, like maybe the only really inappropriate scene at the time.
It’s just like, oh, here we go.
And that, yeah, Sarah Pauli, Katie Holmes, Timothy Oliphant.
Sarah Pauli.
There’s a lot of familiar names in there and familiar faces to check out.
I think that one would be kind of fun to go check out again, honestly.
I haven’t seen it on Blu-ray.
It’s been in stores for quite a while.
So it might be difficult to find.
But if anyone went on to board identity, that whole movie speaks for itself.
I had forgotten about that.
But yeah, the whole Bourne trilogy, even before because he did the first one and then Paul Greengrass did the next couple.
I think there was the Jason Bourne four that came out a couple of years back.
But yeah, Bourne identity is great.
I love that movie.
I love the whole trilogy, the original trilogy of Bourne movies.
But yeah, that one’s still, I’ll go back to that every couple of years.
It’s so great on so many levels.
It’s an amazing little flick.
Mr.
and Mrs.
Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, when I believe were they together at that time making that?
Or is that when they discovered each other?
I can’t remember the whole drama.
We’re not good with the scenes.
When they were together or that’s when they got together or something.
But yeah, Mr.
and Mrs.
Smith was just okay for me.
And then Jumper, which I don’t have as marked watch, but I feel like I must have seen that movie.
Or maybe it was familiar or similar to a different movie of the similar genre at the time or something.
But I still haven’t seen Jumper.
Yeah, it was like his first post Star Wars movie, wasn’t it?
Very possible.
I mean, it was 2008.
In 2010, he did Fair Game with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
Yeah, have you seen that?
I have not seen that one.
It’s actually a nice little flick.
It’s based on a true story.
But yeah, definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it.
It’s nice to see this on the list.
I didn’t even realize that was Doug Liman.
I have it on my shelf.
It was a blind buy, but it was really, really interesting to watch.
You should definitely check it out based on true story.
I don’t want to spoil it.
Yeah, I definitely will.
2014, Edge of Tomorrow, obviously Tom Cruise.
I feel like this is the movie really got introduced to Emily Blunt.
Everyone’s fantastic in this movie.
It’s awesome.
Oh yeah.
Then 2017 was The Wall, which looks like a war military film.
I have not seen that.
No.
Aaron Taylor Johnson, John Cena, a small cast list.
But after that, we have American Maid with Tom Cruise again.
Did you get a chance to see that one?
I still have.
And even though it seems to be one of the budget titles on 4K, I still haven’t actually picked it up.
I think I think it’s worth watching.
It’s pretty good.
It’s also like Tom based on a true story as well, isn’t it?
Yeah, true story of a guy who is like, I’ll just read the scripture transported contraband for the CIA and the cartel in the 80s.
And it’s like, yeah, there’s some interesting.
It’s one of those movies where you’re going to watch it and then go read like a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles.
Yeah, exactly.
I don’t think that actually happened, I don’t know how true to reality it was.
2021, we have a movie called Locked Down and Hathway.
Never heard of it.
Haven’t heard of it.
It’s pretty low rated, 2.3 on Letterboxd.
Then we go into Chaos Walking in 2021 as well, which has a couple of big stars.
You have Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, fresh off their MCU and Star Wars runs.
Did you see this one?
I haven’t seen it yet.
I heard mixed to bad reviews, so I wasn’t exactly running up to see it.
I think this one, is it based on like a YA novel?
I thought I could be just making that up out of thin air.
Honestly, I was just about to say this felt to me like a YA adaptation, except everyone is a bit older in it.
You’re not going to confuse me that Tom and Daisy are like 15 year old kids in the sci-fi setting.
But it does feel like it has that source material.
I gave it two and a half stars for whatever that’s worth.
And then we’re up to, well there’s a movie here called Justice, which looks more like a documentary of sorts.
It’s over Brett Kavanaugh.
Very few, it says 20.3 with only like 50 people had actually watched this thing or logged into Letterboxd.
So I’m not sure that’s, I’m not sure what that is.
It definitely didn’t get a lot of widespread advertising or anything, right?
Like it wasn’t in the public consciousness at all, even though like that was pretty prescient given the recent state of US politics, right?
I’m surprised it didn’t get more visibility in the kind of public dialogue.
Yeah.
And that brings us to the 2024 remake, Road House.
I’m just going to be honest up front here.
I did not see the original Road House.
I don’t know if I lose any credibility.
I’ve never seen it.
I’ve only seen references to it.
I think back like literally 20 years ago, there was a lot of like Road House jokes and Family Guy, where it’s just like that’s where I was becoming aware of Road House.
It was just one of those movies that just never really bothered to go watch.
Did you see it when you’re younger or is this more of a recent watch?
I did not see it when I was younger.
I only, I literally watched it two days ago when we were, I was on Amazon Prime and I saw, oh, the new Road House dropped.
And directly below that on the menu, I saw, oh, the original Road House.
So I was like, okay, yeah, I’m going to watch.
I’m going to do this the right way.
I’m going to go back and watch the original one first and then watch the remake to kind of compare and contrast.
That’s kind of fun, right?
That’s pretty fair.
So you will be our resident expert on the original Road House.
At least it’s fresh in your mind.
Without any sort of nostalgia glasses on, which I imagine plays a factor into a lot of people’s takes on that original Road House with Patrick Swayze.
We have no nostalgia for that one, I guess, in a sense.
So we’re no.
So we’re coming at this from a little bit different perspective.
I know there’s a huge discourse around the original Road House.
You know, some find it’s good, bad, bad, good.
So so bad, it’s good.
You know, some people would argue that it’s kind of one of those movies that kind of defies traditional rankings on the good and bad scale, because it is it’s such a unique beast.
And watching it for the first time, I kind of started to understand where this dialogue is coming from.
And, you know, try to figure out how how do you rank this movie?
It’s one of those kind of campy cult hits.
And for good reason, I think.
But yeah, we can as we talk about the new one, we can there’s some things I want to compare and contrast and and see how they how they approached, you know, that kind of same kind of basic setting and character and the changes they made for better or worse than the new one.
So I think I’ll get started here with the standout of the movie.
For me is Jake Gyllenhaal.
His character is actually interesting.
He does an awesome job.
He’s charismatic and he’s ripped all hell in this movie, too.
Like he’s he’s fit, which I feel like he’s done numerous times for different movies.
But like he’s supposed to be a retired or ex MMA UFC fighter.
And he certainly looks the part.
And he’s just he’s just this badass who is really nice to people, but also really depressed and a complete psychopath at the same time.
Like he’s there’s a few layers to him, I guess.
I’m not sure how that compares to the original like dude, like Swayze’s character from the original one.
But it seemed like this one did a pretty awesome job.
And the rest of the cast was OK, but like didn’t really stand out to me at all.
Yeah, that was one of the things like Jake Gyllenhaal is great and everything.
He’s one of my favorite actors and for good reason ever since.
I think really he came into my consciousness.
I think we talked about this and Donnie Darko.
And ever since then, everything I’ve seen him and he’s just he’s just killed it.
He has an amazing career and he’s one of those guys where no matter the project he’s in, he’s given out a hundred percent no matter what.
Right.
Yeah.
No, he does.
He does an awesome job is like he obviously did a lot of training for the for the role, like to get it in shape, but also doing some of the moves.
There’s a few flashback scenes where he’s in the octagon.
And it those seeds are actually filmed during one of the UFC, like live events, sort of like during different, right?
Sorry, different.
You got like a real crowd in there.
So it’s all like the real crowd, you know, the the real announcers, you’ve got a real MMA fighter.
He’s like acting against in that fight.
And so it lends a bit of credibility to it, I think.
And when you see it on screen, this is pretty legit.
And I think I was reading some interviews with so Conor McGregor, who is a UFC fighter who appeared in this, I think was his first acting gig as Knox, kind of one of the big bad henchmen in this, one of the main bad guys.
I think I remember him saying, yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal was putting in the effort, and he was actually pulling off some of these moves himself.
He’s no slouch.
It’s like I wouldn’t want to fight either, obviously, Conor McGregor, but Jake Gyllenhaal either.
He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.
He was like, you could tell he put in the effort, right?
Yeah.
Conor McGregor, I mean, he’s one of the most infamous, I think, fighters coming out of the whole thing.
It’s just like, yeah, notorious, which I didn’t want to say that because that’s a nickname he’s really embraced and uses, I think, in the ring.
I don’t think Conor McGregor is necessarily a good person, so I kind of rolled my eyes when I found out he’s in this movie, but I understand why he would be in here and I was very dubious on his acting ability.
So I was pleased that they did not really expect him to act throughout this movie.
Like, he basically got to play…
It was almost like a caricature of his persona that he has.
I think I’m not a huge…
I enjoy watching UFC and fights and stuff, but I don’t follow it religiously.
It’s like I know who Conor McGregor is just in passing.
I heard I’m not going to delve into all his background and stuff.
Let’s just say he’s not quite as unsavory as people make him out to be, but he’s not like a stand-up dude either.
It’s like we’re not here to pass judgment on Conor McGregor, partially because he could beat the living tar of both of us with one hand tied behind his back.
In the movie, I think they played to his strengths.
He played this over-the-top, gregarious, larger-than-life, arrogant character, which really felt like Conor McGregor was in his element there and having a blast with this character.
It was a little bit odd, some of his mannerisms, but I think it worked for me.
It didn’t blow me away.
I don’t think he’s going to get nominated for an Oscar, obviously, but it didn’t detract or distract me from the…
It didn’t take me out of the movie that much.
I know some people are like, oh, he’s terrible and he’s bringing the movie down.
But honestly, it was fine.
It was fine.
Well, I think there’s a certain craft to it where you know you’re going to bring someone in who does play into the theatrics of MMA fighting.
Theatrics.
So he has some experience in that regard, and you can understand some of the stuff outside the ring.
When you’re trash talking people, it helps play into an acting thing.
But I think the director here and the crew making this kind of know what he’s able to bring to the role and are able to bring the other actors in to kind of match it.
There’s some silliness throughout the movie that doesn’t just belong to him.
And one of my favorite characters was the kind of, well, the henchman at the beginning who…
In the biker gang there, yeah.
In the biker gang who’s just like, kind of like, oh, this guy seems pretty realistic.
It’s just like when Jake’s character Dalton asks him before he lays the smack down off of him, it’s like, where’s the dearest hospital?
And the main biker guy’s like, brushing off.
It’s like, this guy responds, it’s actually like 25 minutes away.
And the rest of his gang get upset at him for responding to the questions legitimately.
Because there’s a group of gangsters, gang bangers on motorcycles, a little motorcycle gang, and they’re terrorizing this bar, this Road House.
And the one dude is like, he seems super powerful and super nice.
And it’s almost like there’s a fight later on.
And he’s carrying a chair to smash over somebody’s head.
He’s like, oh, hi, Dalton.
Good to see you again.
And the final encounter with that character, he basically comes clean to Dalton because Dalton is on a rampage at that point.
They’re kind of alone.
He’s just like, I just want to ride my motorcycle around.
And I got involved with this gang, but it’s like, they’re not good people, but I just want to ride.
It’s like, that’s probably pretty reasonable.
It’s just like, who are you going to ride with?
But I think having characters like that help bring in Conor McGregor’s energy and stuff and help sell the world that they’re in.
Like, there’s a lot of funny things.
And Dalton himself, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, is pretty funny throughout the movie, too.
He’s like, just the way he approaches conversations.
And he’s all smiles all the time.
He brings a lot to the world, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, Conor McGregor is fun.
I feel like all the other actors.
I don’t know what it was with this movie.
All the other actors were fine, but they didn’t.
They felt like they were reading lines on a page, as opposed to getting involved in the world.
Aside from like Jake Gyllenhaal, really, everyone felt, everyone else felt a little bit flat.
I don’t know what it was.
We’re like part of the reason for me that, you know, this new Road House didn’t work as well as the original 89 version was because this one, like kind of tonally, I don’t think it really knew what it wanted to be, whether it wanted to be like super serious, because like you said at the beginning, it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s got this tragic backstory for the main character.
And he’s like, it’s showing like, oh, he’s suicidal.
That never really comes up again.
Sometimes there’s like these really funny over the top moments.
You know, it’s a fight.
It was a little part in the fight at the end where Conor McGregor is banging Jake Gyllenhaal’s head against the piano and Jake Gyllenhaal makes some kind of quip.
He’s like, Oh, this piano sounds like it is out of tune.
Conor McGregor is like, Oh, it sounds fine to me.
And they keep going.
It’s like little like.
So like there were little like moments like that.
They were kind of dumb, kind of campy things, but they didn’t really play into that.
So I was trying to be serious.
It was there was a couple kind of campy silly silliness.
There was a little bit of humor.
It was a little bit of this and that and never in for me personally, just never found its footing and what it wanted to be.
And I think that’s reflected in, you know, some of the actors.
I don’t think it’s their fault.
It’s just like, I think they were doing the best.
They don’t know what they’re playing towards, right?
Exactly.
They don’t know what kind of tone they’re aiming for.
And so like, it’s almost like they’re trying to play it in like a almost like something in this safe zone where they could edit it together and it could be anything and it ends up being kind of nothing.
And it was it was a shame because it was really like the whole idea.
And I love the character of Dalton, both Patrick Swayze and Jake Gyllenhaal’s taken.
I like this idea of like, and like in this one, like they made it super obvious.
They called it I was like, oh, it’s just like a Western where the stranger comes into town to clean up the saloon.
It’s like, OK, so there’s no subtext at all now.
We’re just going to state the state, the themes and stuff out loud.
Say the subject becomes text.
He rolls into town.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Finish your thought thing.
No, I was like, the only thing missing was that little girl literally turning to the camera and giving like a wink to the audience.
Like, yeah, we can figure this.
It was just, I don’t know, there was some weird stuff like that in there.
Yeah, it’s a shame.
Yeah.
When he rolls into town and that’s the bookstore owner, the father and his daughter working there.
And it’s like, they seem like some of the only sane people, like regular folk in there.
But she is so like almost fourth wall breaking, as you said, where it’s just like turned to the camera.
It’s like, this is like a Western movie, like literally saying Western.
I remember seeing, I’m just going to bring up Batman Begins here, Nolan’s adaptation, where they’re talking about in the movie version, they don’t go see a movie, they go see a play.
Right.
And it’s like the opera.
And in different versions, it’s just like you don’t want to have the characters go see something that they’re in.
So you have a different mediums that play.
So here, instead of saying, oh, this is like a Western movie.
I know I’m watching a movie and now she knows I’m watching a Western movie with her in it.
It’s just like there’s this weird meta stuff going on.
If you would have just said, oh, this is like a Western book and maybe rhyme off an author from before because they work in a bookstore, maybe bring up a book or something that is relevant to the story that’s happening here.
That would have played out a lot better than just saying this is like a Western movie.
She works in a bookstore.
Why not bring up a book?
If you ever read The Gunslinger by Stephen King, it’s like hit, nudge, nudge.
It’s like they got the Gunslinger in there.
It’s like, OK, there’s a lot of ways to do that.
At the same time, she’s like one of the only nice people in the movie that I don’t know.
It’s just that one really threw me for a loop.
It makes you feel weird when you’re watching it.
Yeah, what they really needed in this was what’s really missing, I think, maybe in Hollywood in general, is you’re seeing this kind of generation of character actors starting to die off both figuratively and literally as they’re getting older.
But really, you look at the first Road House and you had a slew of great character actors.
All the characters felt like they were quirky, but they were real people with different arcs and you grew with them.
And this one, the 2024 version, just felt like, I don’t know, there was a weird…
All the actors just, it felt really, really flat in terms of like, they didn’t know what tone of movie they were in, right?
It was like, I was super frustrated because there’s some good talent in there.
And talking about some of the other actors of the characters, the girlfriend didn’t feel like they had a lot of chemistry, like they were sort of a bit flirty, but it didn’t feel like it built well so that when it’s time for the climax and he thinks she’s kidnapped and she is kidnapped and all this stuff, it’s just like, I don’t know, he’s like a man on a mission, but like he didn’t seem that invested in her to begin with.
So in the original movie, there’s a lot more build up between Dalton and the doctor.
I can’t remember her name in the original, but you see them going on dates and they’re having conversations and they’re getting to know each other.
And it’s like, oh, your relationship with, there’s a lot more time spent in the relationship.
And somebody pointed out is like that that first movie was just man.
It’s it’s so it’s it’s crazy because like Patrick Swayze had this.
There was this magnetism about him.
You watch him on screen.
He’s mesmerizing.
He just had this sexual energy about him.
Like that movie was super.
There’s one scene in the original movie.
It’s just ridiculous where he’s doing like this Tai Chi kind of exercises by the lakeside.
And this old dude with his beard who he’s renting a room from, he just comes and he sees him just the way he’s looking at him.
And he kind of runs his hand through his hair.
It’s like, is he is he impressed with him?
Is he turned on by him?
It’s like, but you just can’t help you.
You’re drawn in just by like Patrick Swayze’s pure sexual charisma.
There’s a certain energy around Patrick Swayze that just like it was so unique to him.
And Jake Gyllenhaal is a great actor.
Very different vibe, though, right?
He can make it work for him.
He could have made it work in the content of this movie.
But like that, I don’t know, like Swayze, he just fit that time and that place in that movie so well.
And it’s like this sexual chemistry between him and that doctor.
And this one, I think they they have two conversations and then they go out and they have a date on that sandbar.
It’s like out of nothing.
And it’s like, OK, sure, I guess.
It’s like first you hate him and now you’re dating him on your ex-boyfriend’s boat.
It’s like, I don’t know.
Were there some scenes that maybe that were cut?
That’s what it feels like, really, in terms of their relationship.
And talking about like the length of the movie, if there was stuff I was cut out of this that needed to be in there, like this movie was borderline too long to begin with.
It was basically two hours solid.
I think I had paused the movie because one of my cats was needing my attention.
And it said there was 45 minutes left.
I’m like, 45 minutes?
I feel like I’ve watched a complete movie already.
So much happens in that last 45 minutes too.
I basically feel like I kind of checked out a bit at that point.
I was a little invested in it.
It was just getting too much, too ridiculous for me to handle.
And I want to talk about for a moment, like the job for Dalton to come in, like the bar owner.
She hires him at $5,000 a week.
Okay?
So $20,000 a month to bounce this place.
I don’t know how long she plans on employing him for, but I’m thinking it probably would have served the character better to offer him a low amount of pay, stay in this rusty old houseboat that like barely floats.
And like this is a way for him to maybe redeem himself by helping other people, a way for him to like deal with his past.
But he’s getting paid a lot of money.
And maybe I don’t know how much people have these bars make.
So I could be way off base here, but like $5,000 a week, he’s getting paid in cash.
Like he’s doing pretty well for himself.
He beats up some dudes with no issue.
I don’t know.
Well, I think she was going to hire him.
I think in the beginning of the movie, she said she wanted to hire him for a month.
So it was essentially a 20 grand for a month’s worth of work.
She wanted him to come and clean up the bar.
So this is watching the original movie and then this one.
So this is where I felt like they lost a little bit in terms of the character developments of Dalton played in this one by Jake Gyllenhaal in the original movie.
Dalton played by Patrick Swayze.
He is he refers to himself as a cooler.
But what he is, he’s more than just a fighter.
So in this one, he’s in the original like Patrick Swayze.
He’s he’s kicking butts, taking names.
He can take care of himself, but he’s a total package.
He goes in to clean up and he’s not just fighting and bouncing guys.
He’s like he’s helping clean up the entire operation.
He noticed that one of the bartenders was skimming off the cash register.
So we had him fired like they’re having problems with distribution because like the evil villain controls, like the liquor flow into the town.
So like, oh, like Patrick Swayze’s character, Dalton, has connections to bring in liquor from somewhere else.
He’s helping to hire new people.
He’s firing staff.
So he’s brought in not just as a bouncer, but he’s brought in as like a whole, like essentially like he’s managing that bar to bring it up to speed.
So in this one, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is brought in only for his fighting skills.
So he’s only brought there to beat people up.
And so you feel like, oh, like what else is he going to do, though?
He’s going to beat a bunch of people up.
But like Patrick Swayze was like, oh, he’s he’s like, I’m not a bouncer.
I’m a cooler.
But he’s he’s managing the entire operation to bring it up to speed.
And you see the bar over time, the double deuce, which there is a little bit of an Easter egg when he gets the restaurant right next to the bookstore is called the double deuce in the original movie.
The actual Road House name was double deuce.
But you see, like over time, it’s like it’s getting cleaned up.
Originally, like originally, like the musicians had the cage around them to protect them.
And then by the end of the movie, that cage was down.
You see, like nice neon signs and like the place was getting fixed up.
I felt like this Road House kind of it ended up worse off at the end after they hired Jake Gyllenhaal.
It was really weird.
It’s like you completely wrecked the bar and everything.
And then he left town.
It’s like, well, this doesn’t it was it was really, really weird.
And it felt like it took something away from the character of Dalton.
Yeah, it was it was an interesting show.
It felt like it made him less dynamic.
It’s like he was just a guy who fights as opposed to something like you hear about.
Yeah, because, yeah, it sounds like he’s a lot more like a lot more useful towards their their situation.
It’s just like here.
Like you said, he’s only a fighter and he only like he’s drinking coffee at the bar all the time.
That’s all he does until fights break out.
And in this one, he’s actually training the other bouncers of the bar.
It will let them handle things first.
And if things start to get out of hand, Benny steps in.
Yeah, that’s kind of that element is taken directly from the 1989 version where he’s also like he’s, you know, he’s working with the staff and the bouncers like he’ll like the whole thing with him.
He was training.
It was like, you know, be nice until it’s time not to be nice.
Right.
It’s like if a guy calls you, a guy calls you a name, it’s funny.
You don’t you be nice.
Right.
You you always take him outside.
That’s why there’s another element to is like you take the fighting outside.
Right.
You always you never fight in the establishment.
So like Jake Gyllenhaal, getting the guys outside at the beginning, like the biker gang out is like that was all in keeping with the original character.
I like that when he goes in, like when Patrick Swayze goes into the double deuce the first time and he’s just sitting there drinking coffee, that’s taken from the original one, too, is like he was drinking coffee, just kind of watching.
He’s calm.
He’s cool.
He’s collected.
I think like that part of the character, which I love.
Yeah.
Jake Gyllenhaal had that nailed down.
He’s like he’s you never see him rattled until the very end.
He’s always kind of calm, cool, collected.
And he’s like that idea.
He doesn’t say the line, but he’s like, yeah, you be nice.
You be polite.
It’s about it’s about deescalation.
Right.
He’s like, you don’t want to you want to try and keep keep things as calm as possible.
If you have to fight, it’s a last resort kind of thing.
So how do you feel about this Dalton being a straight up murderer?
Like halfway through or three quarters of the way through, he goes to fight a henchman.
He just tags him in the throat and the guy suffocates and drowns.
And he doesn’t just leave him there.
Like he brings the body around to do stuff with it.
Like going over to me, I was like, oh, I kind of like that.
He’s he’s truly a psycho here, but like surely he must face some consequences from this.
Yeah, because in the twenty twenty four movie spoilers again, he’s a UFC fighter and his whole controversy is in the ring.
He’s fighting this dude.
He’s fighting another fighter and he kills him in the ring.
Right.
And he goes overboard.
He like he knocks him out and he still keeps punching when he’s down.
Right.
So he goes he’s going kind of overboard.
It looks like there’s something to unleash the beast.
Right.
And then they end the movie.
Yeah.
He walks up to the guy and he punches him in the throat and collapses his trachea, which is a nice reference to the original movie where like Patrick Swayze rips the guy’s throat out.
Yeah.
You got to watch this movie like Rambo style.
Yeah.
Spoilers for the original movie.
What happened to his tragic backstory that’s revealed is that apparently his tragic backstory that’s revealed is that he did he killed a man as well.
He killed a man in self-defense.
Turns out he was sleeping with this woman.
He didn’t know she was married and her husband in a jealous rage came to attack him with a gun.
And he killed this man in self-defense.
It was a trial and everything.
And then in this movie, like the original movie, he does end up killing this one kind of main henchman who’s like the analog to kind of McGregor’s henchman.
He’s somebody with like Dalton background in martial arts, knows how to fight, knows how to handle himself, but he doesn’t just like out of the blue.
Like they’re pushing him and pushing him and pushing him, but it’s in the middle of this fight where they’re in the heat of the moment and they’re fighting and he doesn’t plan to go up and murder this guy.
They’re fighting.
It’s again, it’s kind of like self-defense because he pulls a gun on them.
At one point, he’s like the bad guy is starting to lose the fight, pulls a gun, and then only then when he’s in like that kind of life or death situation, then he kind of instinctually disarms him, you know, beats him up, rips his throat out and kind of dumps him in the water.
But it’s not like it’s not like in cold blood, right?
It’s all this idea is like he’s middle passion, passion of the moment.
You’re in a life death situation.
It’s kind of kill or be killed.
So there’s a build up and you feel this like, oh, yeah, he was if you almost feel like his his kind of Zen persona was him.
That was his way of kind of dealing with.
Oh, yeah, like I got out of control and I killed this man.
So I need to keep myself calm, keep myself collected.
But you see, it’s in the heat of the moment.
It’s like, but in this new one, Jake Gyllenhaal is not in the middle of a fight when he kills this guy first, right?
He’s like, he’s calmly, coolly like a psychopath, walks up, punches this guy in the throat and just watches him die.
And then like carries his body around and everything gets goes out and gets ice to keep the body.
I’m just like, this is really all of a sudden they turn him into a psychopath.
I was like, all the like all the nuance of like, oh, yeah, guilt over killing a man is like, oh, he didn’t feel guilty about killing a man.
He just like he was he was kind of a psychopath in this one.
It was really it was a really bizarre shift when that happened compared to the original where there was like at the end, he does go kind of full action hero and he kills a couple more guys when he goes to confront the main bad guy.
But it’s it felt like he’s being pushed and pushed.
There’s no other alternative.
It felt like in this one, like Dalton’s like a cold blooded killer.
It was really weird.
So the henchman just collapses the dude’s trachea that felt like just straight up murder.
All the other.
Yeah.
What do you go full action hero?
That’s a good way of putting it because it turned into like almost generic action movie on the water.
All those killings are fine because it’s like they are really like you’re in the thick of battle, self-defense, whatever, whatever.
But this one, I mean, he had a plan for this body.
He was doing stuff with it.
And what really got me is at the very end, he finally after a huge fight with Doc’s, Conor McGregor’s character, the sheriff shows up and was just like, you know what, Dalton, you helped get my daughter back.
I’m going to cover for you everything.
I just went down.
So, yeah, maybe just leave town.
That’s it.
And I’m like, what?
I’m thinking, okay, at least put them in cuffs and have them force a consequence, a repercussion for killing one dude.
Even earlier in the movie, the guy comes at him with a gun.
He gets them overboard and a crocodile alligator eats them and kills them.
But he’s still trying to save them, it looks like, right?
He’s still trying to pull them off.
So why is he just in cold blood murdering these other guys?
Because he’s gone into psychopath mode.
And then the other element of the sheriff just saying, I’ll cover for you, is the entire motivation of intimidating and bullying the Road House owner and the patrons was that they want to tear down the Road House and build a resort.
And this lady will not sell the Road House to them.
But they’ve shown me multiple times in the movie that the entire criminal organization is protected by the sheriff and the local police are very corrupt and they are willing to murder people and they are willing to burn down via arson, they burn down the bookstore.
Why not just do that to the Road House?
You clearly don’t care because you have all these protections from law enforcement.
Why not just burn it down and kill the owner of the bar?
I mean, it’s grim, but we need a movie with plot in it.
But it was like, if you’re going to let this guy go off scot-free for murder and all this stuff, he just needs to leave down.
Why did you just take care of business earlier?
Right.
Well, and then like the sheriff too was shown to be like half an hour earlier.
He was about to shoot Dalton in cold blood after his cops that he had presumably on the take.
They arrested him and he was like, who’s going to shoot him on the dock there?
And it goes like a full 180.
Like you’ve been working with this dude’s father, like the bad guy.
I can’t remember what his name was.
Ben, Ben Brandt, played by Billy Magnussen.
And like the whole thing was Ben Brandt’s father was running this.
You know, he was a quote unquote legitimate businessman by day.
But also he was in, I guess he had kind of run out of money and he was dealing with some some unsavory characters to get loans to keep keep his dreams afloat because he wanted to like gentrify the island and put up big resorts and stuff.
Yeah.
But then like, so this guy’s been working for this guy’s father for for decades as a corrupt cop, essentially his enforcer.
And all of a sudden at the end, he just was like, oh, yeah, no, you’re fine now.
I’ll let you go.
Get out of here.
I’ll protect you.
It was like, what is happening with this character?
It feels like two different characters or two different cuts of the movie that got mixed together, right?
It was really weird.
I saw one review where they mentioned that the bookstore owner and the daughter had invested interest in making sure that these villains get what they want because the bar is just like full of violence and craziness.
And it’s like it’s obviously bringing the entire area down.
It’s like if that bar went, they would benefit directly from the increased tourism that a resort in that location would bring to the whole area.
It’s just like that’d be a boon for the economy.
It’s like, are these people, they’re clearly villains, but it’s like, are they really that bad?
They are trying to help out.
What was the name of the town here?
Key Glass or something?
Yeah, it was the Glass Keys, I think.
Glass Keys, yeah.
Yeah, that’s another thing too, like in the original film, you saw like the bar itself was getting fixed up because the bar owner in that one, he’d said he’d come into some money recently and he wanted to fix this place up.
He thought it could be something special.
You see that over the course of the movie, it’s literally getting renovated.
You see like the clientele changes where it’s like, oh yeah, the kind of the regulars and all the people who are bar fighting, they’re not in there anymore.
Then you got lineups outside of like, oh yeah, people are coming here, like having a good time and it’s safe and it’s clean now.
And you don’t get that same trajectory in this movie of like, oh, the bar is getting better.
It’s like, no, it’s still it’s still exactly the same as it was just with like one less biker gang around.
I mean, when Conor McGregor came in, when his character Knox comes in and like goes kind of full tilt, tilt psycho, and he starts wrecking up the place.
And all of a sudden, like one of the other patrons is just like bar fight.
And he punches his buddy, presumably in the face.
It was like completely, completely illogical.
But then the whole place erupts and everybody starts fighting everybody else.
It’s like, oh, the clientele hasn’t changed.
They’re all the same jerks who are going to start like fighting each other at the drop of a hat, as opposed to the original was like, oh, no, Dalton actually made a difference.
He helped clean this up.
It was like, OK, they got rid of the clientele.
And they would come back a couple of times in the movie.
It was like, yeah, it was like one of the running one of the running kind of gags.
But it was really effective in the original one was that when he goes to this little town to help clean up this bar, Dalton has like a Mercedes, but he keeps that hidden and he buys like a beater car.
And you’ve seen at the beginning of the movie, he gets his beater car, this old camera, what make and what was like 500 bucks, 200 buck car.
And he goes and buys some extra tires.
He put them in his trunk.
He’s like, this is really weird because he knows every night during that first stretch, he comes out and like his tires are all slashed and there’s like a stop sign through his window and stuff.
So every night he has to go out and essentially change all his tires.
And so he keeps going back to this mechanic.
He’s like, yeah, do you want to buy them like in bulk or do you want to just, it’s like, no, I’ll just keep paying as I go because he knows like people see him drive up.
They’re going to go out and wreck his car.
But then by the end of the movie, you see he’s like, oh yeah, he can drive his regular Mercedes up there.
His car up and it’s not getting wrecked anymore.
Right.
So it’s like little things like that that show, oh yeah, there’s improvements as opposed to like the new one.
We’re just like, yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal is just going to beat up another guy and show off some really cool moves and something like a like a joint locks and and different throws and stuff and show off cool MMA style action.
But like doesn’t you don’t get the sense that things are getting better, really?
I don’t know.
It’s really weird.
And I think we alluded to it earlier, but by the end of this movie, a boat is driven into the Road House and a car is driven through the wall of the Road House.
So the Road House is closed down for quite a while afterwards.
Like they are having a rough.
Hopefully insurance will will pay out a little bit here because he gives all the money that he recovered from the bad guys to the bookstore people, which I think was was nice.
Which it was it was nice, but also super stupid because like all the like the bad guys in the drug cartels are presumably they were hinted at giving that money.
They’re just not going to like that’s marked money essentially.
Right.
Like he’s essentially dooming those bookstore owners like when the mob or like the local cartels come in to look for their money to see what happens like they’re going to like they’re going to kill those.
They’re going to kill that bookstore owner and his daughter because like they have all this cash is clearly from them.
He just doomed that little girl.
She is dead and that functionally at the end of that movie.
It’s grim.
It’s grim.
I mean, when you’re talking about I kind of wish I had seen the first Road House now because or the original Road House because the way you describe it is like this seems like a really like it missed the mark on a lot of things like that.
And just having the Road House be improved throughout the movie would make so much more sense than what happened in this iteration of the Road House saga.
One of the things we do need to talk about here is the fighting because the fighting is front and center, right?
Like this is selling points of the movie.
Jake is jacked up.
He’s doing moves, lots of training, you bring in like a multi title holder like Conor McGregor.
He’s a beast.
He knows what he’s doing.
You can tell.
Apparently, what they’ve done is, I don’t know if they developed a new method, but they’ve done a different technique of fights where every point of impact and contact is a CGI body double.
Saying this with air quotes, add to the realism.
Normally, a movie like you watch The Old Rockies, it’s like clearly they’re swinging.
It’s like they’re half a foot away or more from their opponent.
They’re acting like they’re getting hit.
This one, you see a lot of contact being made.
Every time you do, you’re apparently seeing a CGI double of that person making contact.
And when you’re watching the movie, it does feel a little weird.
I couldn’t put my finger on it until I started reading these reviews.
And I read an article about it afterwards.
It was just like, oh, they went hard into using CGI in this movie.
So now I can see the…
I did look up the budget, but the budget probably blew up because of this.
And maybe they sort of suffered on some other elements like character development and scripts and whatnot.
But I don’t know, like, how’d you feel?
Did you notice the sort of the jankiness of that fighting the CGI in this?
No, I was going to say actually, like, the fighting was probably the strongest part of the movie.
And they were right to kind of sell the movie on the fighting.
I thought it was pretty well done.
It was easy to follow everything.
The whole movie had kind of like a polish to it.
You know, it felt a lot cleaner.
I think that’s a symptom that a lot of kind of modern movies fall into.
They’re trying to polish everything and make it look as good as possible, as opposed to, like, no, like, in real life, things don’t look…
It’s never that clean, right?
The clean lines were like…
The fighting itself and the moves, I was watching to see how they were fighting and everything.
That first fight when Jake Gyllenhaal is slapping all the guys, you know, I thought that was really well done.
And also, on the side note, like, yeah, people always talk about slapping.
If you hit someone, whether it’s closed fist or open fist, as hard as you can, it’s not like a slap, it’s not like a love tap.
You can slap literally living daylight to somebody.
So, like, it was good to see that kind of open hand strike being used.
And it’s like, yeah, somebody could slap somebody and knock them right the heck out.
So, I thought it was really good.
I thought I liked that, you know, Dalton, same as the original version, where he would go in and use kind of, for the most part, until he got pushed too far, he was using the exact amount of force that was needed.
There was a couple of cool scenes where one of the patrons would pull out a knife and he would come at Dalton there and Jake Gyllenhaal just kind of grab him and like use like a joint lock, simple joint lock on his kind of wrist and maybe his elbow and disarm him.
He’s like, OK, he’s not hurting him anymore.
Then he has to.
He’s just doing enough to disarm him when he breaks the guy’s fingers.
When he pulls the gun on him, he’s like, you can’t.
Once I break your fingers, like that gun is useless.
Like it’s not super intimidating.
Like I was always talking to the guy, trying to talk them out of it, right?
Like that gang at the beginning is like, gives them all a chance to like go.
It’s like, yeah, do you have your insurance paid up?
It was like, no, like seriously, though, do you have your insurance paid up?
Is there a hospital?
He’s even talking to the the bar owners like, can we call them an ambulance or something?
Or can I borrow your car?
And there’s like a nice humorous beat at that beginning where like after the fight he does, he takes them in the car and he’s driving these guys.
He just beat up to the hospital.
And just like that whole idea of like the the gentleman kind of that goes back to like the idea of the cowboy.
Right.
So you have this kind of person who has this code of ethics or like he’ll beat people up, but he won’t.
He’s got this this code of honor, right.
Until until the end of it where he goes full psychopath in this one.
But it was nice to see at least for, you know, 90 percent of the movie, they had that.
The character elements kind of continue over from the original Dalton.
Just a slight aside when I’m watching this and he starts slapping people as you described earlier.
The previous night to watching this movie, I finally, with a couple of friends, watched that Winnie the Pooh horror movie.
I think it’s called Blood and Honey.
Oh, yeah.
And in that movie, there is a scene and hopefully this is not a spoiler for the movie.
If you’re going to check out this scary movie or this horror movie on Winnie the Pooh, you’re going to do it regardless.
There’s a scene where Pooh, like Winnie the Pooh himself, just slaps people dead.
And it’s just like there’s literally a scene like Road House where he’s surrounded by people, he’s slapping them.
The exact same thing happens in Blood and Honey where he’s surrounded by a group of dudes and he just turns each one and just slaps them across the face.
I mean, one of them, I think, ends up losing their face because, you know, it’s Winnie the Pooh.
He’s powerful.
He’s got claws.
Yeah, he’s a bear.
But it was the same kind of energy in Road House.
I’m watching is like, oh, man, slap energy is strong in these movies right here.
Yeah, but to me, getting back to your original question, I thought the fighting was really well done.
It was really well choreographed.
But now that you mentioned all the CGI in there, now if I watch it again, I’m not going to be able to unsee that.
So thanks for ruining one of the parts of the movie.
It’s a thing where I thought it looked a little weird, but I am willing to, like when I’m watching it, I’m willing to say this is a stylistic thing happening here.
Like I know they’re not actually making contact.
I don’t know how they’re doing it.
And I’m not thinking about it.
I’m sure some CGI was involved.
It didn’t really bother me that much because there is style to the choreography of how you shoot these fight scenes.
That’s kind of what I’m focusing on.
I did like the kinetic camera, like the movement of it.
We’re not getting a ton of different fast cuts.
The camera is fast though, and maybe a bit too fast sometimes.
Yeah, a little bit.
And I find now there’s like so many crazy camera movements that I think it’s a result of cameras going digital and getting smaller and smaller.
So they’re able to like, I picture somebody holding the camera who’s like very physically fit, like almost an acrobat here, able to like jump around the set with these guys fighting and like jumping around them and like moving it in ways that don’t necessarily feel natural because we’re coming from a lifetime of watching movies filmed on the probably 100 pound plus cameras that aren’t very mobile, right?
And this is like just another advancement in the mobile quick camera, which can be good or bad.
It’s all a different style.
And this one was fine for me.
Yeah, there’s a phenomena in recent movies of like the, the quote unquote the floating camera that like sometimes it takes you right out of it, right?
Because it’s an unnatural movement that you know the camera can’t be there or the camera can’t do the things it’s doing normally, right?
A lot of it’s like the CG stuff with like, I think the Corridor Crew was doing a comparison of like Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim 2 and talking about how do you get that sense of scale?
And I was like, you can see like by having the camera placed at, you know, kind of ground level or the camera is going where like typically a camera can go or from like a human point of view, as opposed to the camera going kind of crate all over the place and crazy, getting some cool shots.
But you sort of lose that sense of perspective and that sense of scale.
So I think that’s a phenomena of a lot of modern movies.
But yeah, it was nice to see also that Jake Gyllenhaal, especially at the end when he was fighting Conor McGregor there, he was getting some, you know, he was taking some hits and he looked pretty beat up at the end.
Although it was an interesting choice in the updated version to have Dalton’s character be immune to stabbing.
That was an interesting creative choice.
So it was also pretty handy that his main opponents used stabbing weapons against him, which was his one strength.
It was like impervious to stabbing.
You could stab him anywhere and apparently it doesn’t do any damage to internal organs.
So that was a nice little superpower that he had.
It is funny because he gets stabbed at the beginning of the movie.
He doesn’t take it out right away, which is the smart thing to do because it’s going to start bleeding.
He takes it out, he puts duct tape on it.
You know, duct tape resolves a lot of issues.
But even at the hospital, he starts bleeding again.
And she’s like, we got to like, stitch that up.
He’s like, no, no, just put a bandage over it.
It’ll be fine.
And then he gets stabbed in that final fight, almost in the exact same location.
It’s really weird too, right?
It’s like, why did they stab him in the exact same spot?
It’s like, oh, we already have the makeup there, just stab him there again.
It was very, very strange.
And honestly, even when he goes, like he starts stabbing Conor McGregor’s character like multiple times, I’m like, you’re kind of losing me in this fight because I can tell these are like CGI daggers of wood that they’re stabbing each other with.
It’s just like, yeah.
And it kind of took away from the character of Dalton.
In the original movie, it was always him, like even when he got his hands on guns, he would kind of toss him aside and go back to hand to hand combat.
It was always like he would be able to, sometimes it was a prolonged fight, but he could always kind of, he won that way, whereas this one had felt like, oh, he could only win essentially by kind of quote unquote cheating in the fight, where he couldn’t beat Conor McGregor until he started stabbing him.
I was like, I don’t know how I feel about that.
I would have rather him take him down kind of on his own terms and have the other guy kind of be cheaty McCheaterson, and he wins by not cheating and kind of not using weapons and sticking to the hand to hand stuff, right?
I don’t know.
It was a weird turn when he beat him at the end.
I wasn’t a huge fan of that, how he won that fight.
And then there’s a mid credit scene where we see Conor McGregor’s character is escaping from the hospital and beating everyone up.
I’m like, give me a break.
Just somebody just watched the Fast and Furious movies with Jason Statham’s character there.
The first thing I thought when they introduced that character of Knox and he’s like walking around butt naked, that’s also a reference to the original Patrick Swayze went butt naked, the original.
But he goes in and he’s like, he’s going to steal this guy’s clothes and it cuts.
All of a sudden, like the whole little market’s on fire and he’s walking away with that guy’s jacket.
That was like, OK, somebody just watched.
I think it was what?
Fast and Furious, like maybe six, maybe where Jason Statham’s character is introduced.
He’s at the hospital there and it’s all on fire.
It pans back to show that the whole hospital’s kind of been ransacked by this character.
And it’s like, I don’t know, it was kind of tongue in cheek.
But again, it was the movie was totally inconsistent.
So it was like, OK, if the whole movie had kind of been like that, it would have been more sense.
The original was like it took itself seriously the whole way through.
All the characters were super serious, but like the whole thing was super campy.
It’s a world where, you know, bouncers are essentially celebrities.
Like people like, you know, that is that’s Dalton.
It’s like it’s a bizarre, some kind of bizarro world where he even makes mention of that.
He’s just like, why does that like literally the next day is like, why does everyone know who I am?
They all know my name is just like, yeah, because you’re in a movie.
Yeah, like the little girl talking about the Western movie.
She she told you earlier, you’re in a movie.
And that’s why everyone knows.
She even updates the genre.
But now it’s a mystery, Western.
That’s right.
She updates it later on.
Why are we still here?
Why are we doing this?
Kids sidekicks almost never work out.
This is not great.
Any other elements, any positives or negatives that you walked away from before we jump into some ratings of the of this film?
I think we touched on on most of it.
The bad guy, Ben Brandt, who was his name, I don’t know, he didn’t feel particularly bad or bright.
Like when he went in, like what?
I don’t know what his final plan was, but he’s like he goes to face Dalton in the bar and he’s like, well, I can’t I can’t intimidate you.
Obviously, I can’t bribe you.
But then he brings up his backstory about how he killed this guy in the ring and then walks away.
I’m like, what is that supposed to do?
I don’t know what you’re supposed to like.
Like he’s not like he can use that as leverage because it’s a public event.
Everyone knows that this happened.
Yeah, so everyone knows your Dalton is out there.
Because he’s like, let me give it one more try because like Conor McGregor’s character Knox was called up by his father from prison because his son was messing everything up with his empire.
So like, let me talk to him at one point, right?
Ben Brant talks to Knox.
He’s like, let me try before you go in and wreck up the place and kill this guy.
Let me go and try my way.
It’s like, well, what was your way supposed to be?
Like, yeah, there was nothing there.
Um, so I don’t know, the whole it was weird.
Like character motivations were kind of weird and you didn’t really get to know the bar staff.
You got to know a couple of the bounties a little bit, but in the original, you really got a sense of all the bar staff and and you saw the little character arcs.
One major element I have to point out that was missing from this, from the twenty twenty four remake of Road House that was in the original.
That was, I think, was a huge missed opportunity.
I think it was a huge thread that that they should have kept in.
In the original movie, there was a character played by Sam Elliott, who was another cooler like like Patrick Swayze.
It was a mentor of Patrick Swayze.
And at one point when things are getting so bad because Patrick Swayze is like, yeah, things are going to get way worse before they get better because he realizes like, oh, yeah, I pushed these guys around.
I kicked them out of the bar.
They’re going to hold grudges and they’re going to come back.
So it’s like, yeah, because people like the like all the people working at the bar like, oh, yeah, you kick those guys out.
It’s like, don’t celebrate yet.
They’re going to there’s a ways to go before they come back.
So things get so bad.
Sam Elliott’s character, his mentor character comes up and that adds a whole new dynamic.
Well, he had this mentor.
He had this older, you know, the older kind of character doing the same same job that he was doing as a cooler, who’d like go in and clean up the whole bar, not just not just the bouncing part, but like, you know, the actual management of the place and to have that mentor in there, to have somebody from the old days from back home that he could kind of bounce off of a little bit to see, you know, he was he had a bit more swagger than Patrick Swayze.
He wasn’t as kind of Zen and stoic.
So you saw it was almost like it was almost like seeing like a different version of a Jedi.
Right.
It was almost like the Qui-Gon Jinn where like all the Jedi were kind of like, you know, they were one way and then Qui-Gon Jinn comes in and he’s a bit of like a loose cannon.
It’s almost like this order of bouncers.
And Sam Elliott was like this, this kind of the kind of like the the the kind of cool uncle comes in.
And that was a real missed opportunity.
I think I think there was a was a huge thread that was dropped in this one where he didn’t have that mentor character to kind of come in and ground him and to give him some like there were some really great dramatic beats.
And, you know, spoilers for the original movie, but one of the things that sets him off like in this movie, it’s like, OK, his girlfriend of a couple of days is is kidnapped, but not really kidnapped because he kind of sussed out.
It’s like, yeah, it was like the cop came to him and was like, oh, yeah, my daughter’s kidnapped.
He’s like, yeah, sure, she is like court.
Of course, it’s a setup.
But the in this movie, in the original movie, like they killed Sam Elliott’s character spoilers.
So like his best friend and mentor was murdered and that kind of sets him over like it’s like, OK, now I’m going to go and face down against the bad guy.
You could see like there was clear motivation, clear personal stakes in this and and that was kind of missing.
And if there was no personal stakes at one point, they asked him, like, why are you sticking around?
Like, what do you have?
Like, what are you doing here?
I belong here.
I think Ben, Ben Brant, the main character is like, what are you doing here?
Like, why?
Why don’t you just move on?
And I was like, I said, audience member, I was like, that’s a really good question.
What the hell are you still doing here?
Like, why?
Why are you still in this fight at this point?
Right.
When the original movie is like, OK, yeah, they say murder his best friend and mentor.
And so all of a sudden he has this kind of personal stake in this.
And yeah, it was just there was a lot more for all the campiness and cheesiness of the original 1989 version, you know, a movie that could only be made in the 80s.
Right.
It was it was that kind of specific brand of cheese and camp.
But it was also earnest.
And, you know, this movie, it couldn’t only be made in 2024.
That makes sense.
It’s not like a movie of its time.
It could have been made 10 years ago and it felt exactly the same.
It it feels I don’t know, it feels kind of unmoored to use a nautical term.
It was appropriate for the setting of this movie.
But there was no there was no heart in this one.
It felt, you know, it was the 2024 version that is there was, you know, there was no it didn’t have to be campy or cheesy, but it could have had picked a direction and gone with it.
And I think there’s a couple kind of major plot threads that were disregarded.
I assume in the interest of kind of streamlined storytelling.
But it really then you take you pull on one of those strings and all of a sudden, like motivations don’t quite add up.
Plot points don’t quite add up.
It’s like, you know, there’s a there’s a myriad of things that happen.
You pull one of those threads and the whole thing kind of comes loose.
And that’s kind of how I felt about this one.
We should talk about ratings.
I unless you have anything else to add.
No, I’m good.
You’ve been listening to talk for so long.
I’ll let I’ll give the listeners a break here.
So normally we talk about ratings from around different sites.
Rod Tomatoes, IMDb, Letterboxd.
Afterwards, I want to put it before our own ratings.
So play along at home as well.
I’m going to ask Nathan what he thinks the average is, because he never looks this stuff up, so he doesn’t know.
But he’s going to guess.
So you guess at home as well.
The Ron Tomato Critic, out of 100 percent, what do you think the Ron Tomato Critic rating is for Road House 2024?
67 percent.
It’s very close.
It’s 63 percent on this one.
And how do you feel the Ron Tomato audience rating would be here?
I think it’s going to be higher on this one.
I’m going to say 75.
Switchful’s two numbers around.
It’s 57 percent.
Really?
I thought for sure this is one where the audience would far away the critics.
Right?
Huh.
Because you would think people would probably, like I’m thinking nostalgia at the very least, but now after listening to you talk about the original Road House, it clearly sounds like the better movie, right?
So it’s like, oh, surely it must be rated lower.
But IMDB uses 10 out of 10.
What’s its users average on Road House?
I’m going to say a 6.4.
Very close, a 6.2.
And bonus round, what’s the original IMDB, sorry, what is the original movie’s IMDB rating?
Oh, I don’t know, 7.7?
6.7.
So they’re very, very close, 6.2 for the new, 6.7 for the old, which is kind of interesting.
No, it’s not.
Letterboxd.
It’s using the five point scale.
What do you think the Letterboxd users have?
And keep in mind that I think Letterboxd is like a little more, like this is a recent movie and it’s a little more susceptible to like recent movie bias, I think.
I’m not trying to lead your score in one way or another, but what do you think?
Okay, I’m going to go higher than I thought then.
I’m going to do like a 3.3.
Ooh, you’re too high.
It’s 2.7.
2.7.
Damn it, I was going to go like a, I was going to go closer to that.
See, I think this is a case where normally it would be higher, but I think it’s getting rated lower because people are seeing this and it’s fresh and people are also watching the original Road House and thinking this is not nearly as good.
I’ve seen amongst the people I follow a lot of very low stars on this one.
The original Road House, what is its letterbox average?
Letterbox?
I don’t know, like 3.7, 3.8?
It’s a 3.4.
So there’s definitely a lot of favorite, definitely a lot of more people enjoying the original one than this new one, but it’s still a pretty fresh release, but I don’t suspect that’s going to climb too much.
Now, those are all good and everything, but the real ratings are our own.
These are the ones that really matter.
So I got to ask you, we use, well, to remind everyone, we use the five-star system with a bonus-like option, which mirrors the letterbox rating system.
What is your rating on Road House 2024?
Yeah, I’ve kind of been going back and forth.
To me, it’s like a 2.5 to 3-star movie.
I’ve been kind of airing close to 3.
For me, this is kind of like a right down the middle of the road kind of movie.
It was fine.
It was not as terrible as people say, but it was not like, as Doug Liman has said, as like his best movie.
His masterpiece for me still remains live, die, repeat or edge of tomorrow, however you want to call it.
For me, a phenomenal sci-fi movie.
Maybe I was kind of lightning in a bottle, but for me, that was like, that’s a five out of five star movie.
So like Doug Liman can do really well.
Like this Road House remake, with all due respect, I can see exactly why Amazon didn’t make a push for this in theaters.
This feels exactly like the kind of direct to DVD, direct to video kind of remake, where it just doesn’t have the heart and soul of the original.
So I’ll be generous and end up at a three.
But like to me, that’s kind of, it’s a middle of the road kind of movie.
It’s not loved or hated.
What was your overall rating for this, Brian?
I was going to give it three stars.
I would love if I could give something 2.75 stars, because this would be the same boat as you.
I’m kind of surprised you didn’t go two and a half.
I might.
I don’t know.
I actually haven’t entered it yet in Letterboxx, so I’m still up in the air.
By the time you listen to this, we might have completely different ratings on our Letterboxx.
It’s a five.
But yeah, I enjoyed watching the movie.
I didn’t think it was bad.
I mean, it was comfortably put together.
It was weird reading afterwards that Doug Liman was saying it’s like some of his best work.
I think he was calling it Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as some of his best work too.
I understand hyping up your movie, but come on.
I mean, we talked about his filmography before.
There’s a lot of stellar films that he’s done before.
This is not even close to a lot of those movies, but it’s still a fun movie.
It’s entertaining.
You can pay attention to the plot.
You don’t have to.
You just wait for the fighting scenes.
There’s a lot of gorgeous scenery.
I think it was filmed not actually in Key West, but somewhere tropical.
I mean, it looks gorgeous.
It looks the part.
There’s a lot of, I mean, action.
I mean, I’ll just keep going back to the action.
I mean, Jake, he’s charismatic too.
I mean, he’s good presence on screen.
Ivo’s character is kind of a psycho.
And I mean, after hearing about everything from the original Road House, maybe if I had actually watched it, maybe this one would get rated lower because everything you’re telling me before makes so much sense that this one does not make any sense.
No, and the original Road House is, you know, it is what it is.
It’s an obvious product of its time.
It is cheesy and it’s campy.
People are being like super serious.
But for some reason, if you, if it, if it vibes with you, it vibes with you.
It’s one of those like, I understand now why it has this kind of cult classic status.
And, you know, people are kind of laughing at it, but they’re laughing, not laughing at it, but they’re almost like laughing with it, right?
It’s like a loving thing.
It’s almost like the phenomenon with like The Room.
Not in that it’s so bad, it’s good, but that it’s so, it’s so such a unique movie.
And I’ve been, I’ve been struggling to rate this one as well because it defies rating, right?
It’s like it’s beyond that good and bad spectrum.
It’s beyond like this.
It’s not so bad.
It’s good.
I don’t think it’s a, I don’t, it defies those kind of ratings, right?
It’s a, it’s a fun movie, but it’s got like the heart and the soul and my God, the sex appeal.
I mean, I mean, Patrick Swayze, you know, it was, it was a great actor all around, but like just looking at it, it was like every character in the movie just like wants to be with them.
And it’s like, yeah, like I can, you understand why there’s this like this, this sexual charisma and they played it up incredibly well.
And like you were saying, like Jake Gyllenhaal does a great job in this movie, but you want to see some great performances by Jake Gyllenhaal.
Go check out his work with Denis Villeneuve and like Enemy and Prisoners.
Check out his work in Donnie Darko for some like top tier, God level performances, right?
It’s like he did a great job in this, but like I don’t think this was like a career defining performance.
Yeah.
And the supporting cast too was just kind of meh overall.
They were there.
I couldn’t say anything really good or bad about them.
Yeah, this new Road House 2024 is one of those things.
I hesitate to use the word soulless because I know people put so much effort into this, but like whatever the spark the original had, this one just didn’t have that spark.
It felt like an exercise and trying to make it more kind of modern and more edgy.
You know, trying to make, oh, he’s a UFC fighter now, which is like, okay, sure, that’s like a more kind of modern, it sets it in a different time period.
But for whatever reason, it just, I don’t know, it just didn’t feel, it didn’t feel like it had that kind of spark or that passion behind it.
You know, starting with the script onwards, it was just, like we said, it’s a perfectly fine movie.
It’s one of those, you know, if you’re folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon, you need something in the background, throw on Road House 2024, because you can kind of watch it with one eye or the other side of your eye and not miss anything really.
If you want to watch this for essentially Jake Gyllenhaal’s abs, you’re not going to be disappointed.
But if you’re looking for the next kind of cult movie experience that’s going to inspire people, you know, generations from now, like the original Road House, I think you’ll be sorely disappointed.
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