All kinds of filtered nostalgia are at work here. Continuing the stubborn false-memory syndrome that recently saw awful premillennial films such as Hocus Pocus get reinventions, Hollywood now remakes that para-western thing with the much-missed Patrick Swayze as a simmering bar-room bouncer. The postmodern 1990s having intervened, we find ourselves in a community that explicitly references the reinventions. Early on, Jake Gyllenhaal, more metrosexual than Swayzexual, glowers into a scruffy Florida town and chats to a likable bookshop employee (Hannah Love Lanier). She notes that this is just like a western. The lone stranger stands up against circling hoodlums. He walks alone. But he shelters a secret. His new pal later suggests this may be “more of a mystery western than a straight-up shooting western”.
Well, maybe. The second-most-urgent reason for domestic viewers to chase down Road House 2024 is its surprising adjacency to The Quiet Man. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is a former mixed-martial-arts fighter who is shunning limelight after some sort of disaster in the ring. It takes a while for the details to emerge, but few will be in any doubt it is a similar trauma to that hanging over John Wayne in the John Ford film. That makes Ellie (Daniela Melchior), local doctor and daughter of a bruiser cop, the Maureen O’Hara in all this. Is Hannah Love Lanier taking the Barry Fitzgerald role? Close enough.
The most urgent reason for Irish viewers to watch Road House is, as you will almost certainly be aware, the presence of one Conor McGregor among the cast. Whatever one thinks of his performance, credit is due the producers – and his people – for casting him against type as fragile, sensitive best friend to the chief love interest. The role is a thumping cliche, but who could resist the scene in which he helps Ellie paint her toenails as the two chew over failed romances and discuss their favourite characters on Drag Race?
I’m joking, of course. McGregor plays a snorting maniac hired by the bad guys to smack Dalton in the head and sever the tracheas of anyone else within gobbing distance. His first scene has him stride through foreign streets buck naked while a following camera captures the McGregor arse for posterity. Close to his first line, delivered after a long unfed journey, is “Thank you, God. Sandwiches!”
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All four words are intelligible. He proves capable of delivering such dialogue while standing upright, walking about the set and – you’d expect this – brawling with anyone foolish enough to get in his way. That is essentially all such stunt casting requires. Nobody would mistake McGregor for Lord Olivier, but you could have said the same of Schwarzenegger 40 years ago, and look where he ended up. For the rest, he functions adequately as an organic special effect, part Tasmanian devil, part interior cyclone. Those wishing him to fail (as if!) need to pretend he is trying for something other than what he was actually asked to do.
McGregor is little more than second henchman in a film that is a tad too well made for its own good. Shooting in widescreen, Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity, makes a wild hooley of the vast road house – generically classy bar bands playing behind cages – as we drift from CGI-seasoned brawls to an ending sufficiently explosive to give even Michael Bay tinnitus. So much effort has gone into making a small story enormous that one can understand Liman smarting at Amazon electing to release Road House only on its streaming service. Gyllenhaal swaggers. The seascapes gleam. McGregor eats his sandwiches. The film is (like its predecessor) no classic, but it would play well enough to a packed Friday-night audience in Megaplex 3. Not to be, alas.
Road House streams on Prime Video from Thursday, March 21st
