OK, before we get to the nitty-gritty of my review of the 2024 remake of Road House, let’s pause and bow our heads as we give major props to the classic hunk of 1989 cheese that inspired it. Starring Patrick Swayze in one of his career-defining roles and directed by Rowdy Herrington (great name), it was made for 15 million and brought in over four times that amount when released in May of ’89. Rewatching it again recently, I was reminded how effortlessly cool Swayze was as a no-nonsense bouncer with a heart of gold. He had time to crunch the bones of the bad guys (led by greasy Ben Gazzara), love the ladies (leggy Kelly Lynch), and shoot the breeze with his mentor (a wild-maned Sam Elliott). Even pushing 35 years old, the film’s popularity as an enduring cult favorite was well earned.

Fast forward to 2024, and what do we get? The latest sacrificial lamb in a ceaseless parade of plundering and repackaging beloved ‘80s titles that nobody requested. This unnecessary endeavor is a prime example (available on Prime Video) of an industry approaching a creative bankruptcy no government, domestic or galactic, could bail out. Even with a qualified director and A-list star taking up the mantle, it is D.O.A. almost from the beginning, a hollow recreation of a classic strung together by frayed yarn. Stretching to an exhausting two hours, it takes what made the original lively and fun and makes it into a pedestrian fight film with no one to root for.

Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal, The Guilty) is a disgraced former UFC fighter so feared that just entering an amateur ring at a seedy club sends the current champion (a blink and you missed him Post Malone, oops there he goes!) high-tailing it out the door. That’s all Frankie (Jessica Williams, Booksmart) needs to see to know she’s found the right guy to be the bouncer at her beachfront bar in the Florida Keys. Called The Road House (“Why is it called The Road House? Isn’t Roadhouse usually one word?” Gyllenhaal asks her, “Yeah, that’s the joke. It’s a roadhouse but it’s called The Road. House. Get it?” Uh….sure.) it has attracted a raucous crowd that she and her staff can’t manage anymore. It’s also caught the eye of land developer Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen, No Time to Die), who has bought up all the property around it and has been pressuring Frankie to sell.

When Dalton arrives, he is barely two steps off the bus when he’s befriended by a local girl (Hannah Lanier) who works down the street from The Road House in a tiny strip mall with her dad (Kevin Carroll).  He also lands unique lodgings in a houseboat nearby but is told to watch out for a grumpy crocodile that menaces the marina (I wonder if that will come into play?). At work, he gets down to business on his first night, sending a swarm of Brandt’s goons to the local hospital, where he meets ER doc Ellie (Daniela Melchior, The Suicide Squad), the daughter of the local Sheriff (Joaquin de Almeida, Fast X) who asks people to call him Big Dick. (Hey, I’m just a simple critic that only reports the facts!)

Anthony Bagarozzi & Chuck Mondry’s script has some howlingly bad lines when it’s coherent. When Dalton is talking to a local man about the business dealings of a recently dispatched thug, the man answers: “Drugs, probably. Why do you think they call this the Keys?” I’m sorry, what? That’s indicative of the screenwriters failing to understand why the original worked so well, almost in spite of itself. Efforts to make this reworked Road House into something more than the sum of its parts don’t jive with the story’s tone, setting, or performances, creating a dissonance that rings out loudly.

I’ll always be in the Gyllenhaal fan club, but in Road House, he’s lost his valuable gift for bringing nuance to even the slightest of roles. Deviating from the cool, collected demeanor that Swayze embodied for the original, Gyllenhaal’s is little more than a cartoon of the brutes he’s meant to be evicting from the bar. As flashy, vicious, and viscous as the fight scenes are, you don’t root for him because he does awful things seemingly for the pleasure of it. Maybe that’s why UFC Champion Conor McGregor manages to shine so brightly as his biggest opponent, arriving on the scene stark naked and running away with the film possessing an unbridled self-confidence. Love or hate him out of the ring, but he has a charisma on screen that is impossible to resist.

There’s more heat between Gyllenhaal and McGregor than what, I think, was supposed to be a minor romantic subplot involving Melchior’s plucky ER doc. Woefully underdeveloped (women in this film are generally underserved), Melchior is barely present and seems only to be brought out when it doesn’t make sense for Williams to be in the scene or Lanier to be there to brighten Dalton’s day. The entire plotline involving Lanier and her father could be excised, and no one would have noticed. Why it’s there at all is a complete mystery to me – they have no bearing on anyone or anything else in the film.

Doug Liman has directed many reputable films (and Chaos Walking), but this is well deserving of the streaming debut he so loudly protested when it was announced Road House would be skipping a theatrical run. Trust me, audiences paying upwards of $20 to see this on the big screen would be furious over the lame dialogue and the poor special effects (any scene involving a car looks straight out of Grand Theft Auto), not to mention the general feeling that no one had any reverence for the original. You don’t have to do a scene-for-scene remake to honor what came before, but there must be something in your revisionism to indicate that you understand the responsibility you are undertaking. It’s obnoxious and forgettable, regrettably dragging down several talented individuals with it.  Turn on the lights, it’s time for these crummy remakes to go home.