Road House Movie Review: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Performance Is The Highlight Of This Strange Remake!

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a bare-knuckle boxer who is “goofy, relaxed and remarkably free of facial damage” in the “scrappy and overcomplicated” Road House reboot. Serving its customers trayfuls of bone-crunching martial arts bouts and bluesy rock’n’roll numbers, Road House earnt some bad reviews when it came out in 1989, but it has since become a cult favourite. It’s hardly a masterpiece, but it’s a guilty pleasure that feels less guilty than it should, largely because its leading man, Patrick Swayze, seems to be taking it so seriously. However crass and silly it gets – and, boy, does it get crass and silly – Swayze’s sincere, soulful presence suggests that maybe there’s something respectable about it, after all.

Still, even its most ardent fans would admit that there is room for improvement in terms of plot, characterisation and pretty much everything else, and so a remake that uses the back-of-an-envelope premise of “supercool bouncer beats up a bar’s most unpleasant patrons” doesn’t seem like the worst idea. Sure enough, the new Road House, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The Edge of Tomorrow), does improve on the original in some ways. The snag is that, like a clumsy handyman in a silent comedy, Liman can’t solve one problem without causing several more.