‘Road House’ review: Conor McGregor steals the show, but remake fails to live up to original in any way

For better or worse, remakes and reboots have become part of the ever-churning movie-making machine in Hollywood. Sadly, there are far fewer examples where they work — thank you Zack Snyder for the tremendous Dawn of the Dead remake from 2004 — than the long list of attempts that have failed miserably (here’s looking at you Oldboy, Psycho, Point Break, Ghostbusters, White Men Can’t Jump, etc).

Talks of a Road House remake have swirled for years, and at one point, UFC Hall of Famer Ronda Rousey was signed to star in the reboot film. Then, it died in development.

The 1989 cult-classic starring Patrick Swayze wasn’t exactly a hit amongst critics, though Roger Ebert astutely recognized that “this is not a good movie … but viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.” While it wasn’t a runaway smash hit at the box office, Road House became a fan favorite in subsequent years largely thanks to replays on cable. The film lives in the pop culture zeitgeist as an example of a movie that really does get better over time.

Unfortunately, there’s no reason to follow Swayze’s advice to “be nice” about the Road House remake just released on Prime Video — it’s tough to imagine anyone will race back to watch, quote, or experience this one again.

Directed by Doug Liman, who’s best known for films such as Edge of Tomorrow, Swingers, and The Bourne Identity, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role, the Road House remake (or let’s say reimagining) fails to carry over any of the charm or testosterone-filled swagger that made the original one of the most watchable popcorn flicks of the past 40 years.

In this version, Gyllenhaal plays Elwood Dalton, a former UFC fighter with a dark past revealed through a series of flashbacks and taunts from his enemies. He isn’t a lifelong bar bouncer, but rather a guy who shows up at underground fight clubs and scares off the competition before a single punch is thrown. His intimidating presence leads a bar owner (played by Jessica Williams) to recruit him to clean up her seaside establishment, appropriately named, ‘The Road House.” Of course, the place is being tormented by a group Swayze would call troublemakers: 40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.

A reluctant Dalton eventually takes the job and soon discovers this one-horse town in the Florida Keys has a lot more going on than just some rowdy bar patrons. It’s not long before he gets mixed up in everybody’s business. There’s a run-in with a doctor at an emergency room that leads to a half-hearted attempt at romance, and he runs afoul of the local rich guy, who’s determined to buy The Road House to build a posh resort. The rich guy’s motivation? To stick his success in the face of his father, who’s rotting away in prison.

Pretty much everybody in this film feels out of place, especially Gyllenhaal, who’s trying to play a stoic tough guy with none of the charm or charisma that Swayze carried through the original film. The only time in the film Gyllenhaal’s character actually manages a somewhat enjoyable interaction is the opening of the film’s trailer, where he smacks around a bunch of bikers determined to smash up the bar he now calls home.

Outside of that lone brawl, Gyllenhaal’s Dalton feels like he’s half-asleep and sinking in quicksand in just about every other scene in the movie. Make no mistake, he is a great actor, and he’s done well in past action roles. But this one ain’t it.

The rest of the cast is largely forgettable, though Billy Magnussen does his best with limited material as the bad guy in the film. His smirking smugness is overshadowed by the inability to do much of anything right in this movie, which makes him seem like more of a buffoon than a foil for Dalton. That problem, like so many other issues with this film, is the responsibility of screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry.

Truth be told, the only person in the entire production that could have fit into the original is UFC superstar Conor McGregor, who plays an over-exaggerated version of himself as a hired gun named Knox. He comes to the Florida Keys to clean up the mess that Magnusson’s character made, and his cocky Irish accent, brash physicality and wide-eyed mean-mugging really are the only fun parts about this movie.

No one is going to mistake McGregor as a seasoned actor, but he steals every scene he’s in. He attacks his role with an over-the-top exuberance that should trickle down to every other cast member in this film. Unfortunately, nobody follows his lead, and the movie pays for it.

What’s supposed to be a goofy, fun action film gets dragged into the muck through an overambitious and nonsensical plot that doesn’t really serve anybody in the remake. The fight scenes in this film will also drive you crazy, because there’s way too many digital effects at work, and the kinetic action is a poor attempt at making things look flashy and modern rather than gritty and real.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the original was the hilarious, yet addictively memorable dialogue that lives in your brain forever (who could forget lines like, ‘Pain don’t hurt,” or “You’re too stupid to have a good time!” And we won’t even talk about what Jimmy did to guys in prison). But this film offers nothing worth quoting outside of a few deliciously delivered lines from McGregor.

You’d think that Liman and the screenwriters would have purposefully injected at least some of the best parts from the original Road House into the remake. Instead, it feels like they took all of that out and replaced it with a poorly written script that forgets how to have a good time.

The runtime for this movie is also ridiculously long at more than two hours. This thing could have easily been edited down to 80 minutes without skipping a beat.

Even if this wasn’t a remake, Road House feels like a movie that started out with the best of intentions as a modern day action-comedy. But the finished product reminds you why Amazon dumped this directly to streaming rather than putting the film into theaters. There’s not much funny about this movie either, and it pretty much fails to live up to the original in every way possible.

Outside of a super cut to witness McGregor crank things up to 11, just revisit the original film and watch how Swayze and company did it right.