Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is on the run from his past.  Formerly a UFC fighter, he now makes his way through underground fighting circuits, but few will challenge him as his reputation as a wild man precedes him.  That clout is exactly what Frankie (Jessica Williams) is looking for in a bouncer at her bar, The Road House, which has been overtaken by thugs and gangsters.  Dalton reluctantly agrees to help clean up the bar, but real estate magnate Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) has his eyes set on the beachfront property and calls in Knox (Conor McGregor), one of his father’s enforcers, to take care of Dalton and force Frankie to sell the property so that he can begin developing a luxury resort. 

Doug Liman directs Road House, a reboot of Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle, for MGM under the Amazon Prime contract.  The film, penned by Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry, premiered at South by Southwest where Liman was nominated for the Audience Award ahead of its streaming release.  In the opening minutes of the 121-minute film, Liman quickly sets the absurd tone that the rest of the narrative will adopt so audiences have an easy out if it is not going to be for them.  For those that do stick it out with Dalton, they will be treated to some pulpy fantastical feats choreographed by Steve Brown who is not afraid to lean into the impossibility of it all so that the sequences always carry the energy of an adrenaline shot to the heart. 

Gyllenhaal is no stranger to roles that require a physical transformation and Dalton is the latest no-holds-barred fighter that the actor embodies.  He does well in the fight scenes and makes for a believable action hero in an unbelievable world, but it is surprising how dazed and disconnected his performance is in the more dramatic, plot-driven scenes.  A back story – though more a singular incident – is slowly pieced together through dreams and memories that fill in the gap of how Dalton got to rock bottom where we meet him at the opening of the film, but it stays so separate from the main story that it does not really serve to color his character in a meaningful way.  To be fair, we are spending most of our time with a recovering Dalton, one who has found his purpose and is slowly beginning to open himself up to having a human connection be it with Frankie, an ER nurse Ellie (Daniela Melchior), or some of the other staff at The Road House: Laura (B.K. Cannon), Billy (Lukas Gage), and Reef (Dominique Columbus).  This helps to inform some of his hesitations, but as an actor, Gyllenhaal really seems to be reaching for something that is simply not there on the page for Dalton and the performance really struggles. 

Also left grasping at straws is McGregor as Knox, the heavy of the film.  Himself a professional fighter and not one to have fully bridged over into being thought of more as an actor like some of his contemporaries have – Dwayne Johnson, Dave Bautista, and to a lesser extent John Cena, for example – it is an easy enough role for McGregor to embody, but there is a noted awkwardness in how he holds himself on camera.  The camera on a movie set moves and operates much differently than it does in the ring, and while McGregor can swing and kick with force, he too struggles in the moments when the film slows down.  He moves across the frame, when not in a fight sequence, with all the grace and charisma of a large carcass dangling from a meat hook and fumbles his line readings with an unwavering, albeit manic, timbre. This bit of stunt casting is far from a revelation, and while the script is smart enough to not ask too much of an unproven talent, McGregor still crumples under the weight of trying to fit into the world of the film. Even though he is hitting all the notes well enough, he stands out like a sore thumb in his scenes.

Thankfully, though, these rigid performances can largely be forgiven as we are not watching Road House as some searing personal drama out of Sundance about the strain that luxury tourism has on small, local communities.  We are watching Road House to see a sniveling tech bro, nepo baby get his face punched in, and that is exactly what Liman delivers. Ben is hardly a threatening force in the film, but he is so easy to hate that it is hard to discredit Magnussen’s similarly one-note performance as a whiny little rich boy playing with daddy’s money as a strike against the actor. Like with everything else Liman is committing to screen, Ben is an absurd character who we meet while he is getting a straight razor shave while lounging on his yacht during a bit of turbulence. Much in the same way that our introduction to Dalton – taking a stab to the abdomen in a dingy parking lot and cleaning it up with a bit of duct tape pulled from the trunk of his car – the sooner audiences lock into the silliness of the film, the more fun it becomes watching Magnussen chew up the scenery faster than many-a Bond villian. 

While there is a lot of goofy fun to be enjoyed – preferably along with a few island lagers to help the logic of the film make just a little more sense – Road House does teeter into a bit of a messy plot that drags the energy to a halt. It is very preoccupied with showing Dalton getting tangled in this new web of relationships and ties to people in the community. Besides Frankie, there is Charlie (Hannah Love Lanier) and Stephen (Kevin Carroll) who run the bookstore near the bus stop and are the first of the locals whom Dalton meets, and they form an immediate friendship that later gets cashed in as some easy emotional stakes in the narrative. They are needed, though, as the romance that is allegedly forming between Dalton and Ellie is particularly thin and contrived more so from lack of support on that page than anything the actors are doing, but their inclusion is a surprising wavering of faith from the scriptwriting team that otherwise is committed to big, bold swings. It becomes, not too complicated, but too convoluted for its own good, and many of the same set pieces could have been reworked with minimal rewriting or structural changes to the script that would have all served to streamline the story and keep the energy up. Road House is one of those rare films that we do not want to be able to catch our breath, because as soon as it slows down, we begin to think about what we are seeing, and as soon as we begin to apply that thought the whole house of cards crumbles. 

The update that Liman brings to screens is flawed if you are looking at it through the lens of art, but as a crowd-pleaser, it is firing on all cylinders. With Dune: Part 2 (2024) still close in the rearview and the state of cinema-going currently at 1 or 2 visits a month on average – and that is only of consumers who actually go to the cinema – the unfortunate direct-to-streaming path was probably the wisest move for Amazon/MGM, but hardly the best move for the film or the filmmakers who desperately sought a theatrical release. A careful eye will notice three damning words at the very start of the film: “An Amazon Company.” Those words, under the iconic MGM Lion, turned one of the century-old pillars of American moviemaking into a marketing line item on a P&L statement. It is the problem with tech companies like Amazon and Apple sucking up all of these studios or individual properties; they get these titles and then have no idea what to do with them. They prefer to keep them out of theatres to force subscribers onto their platform, but unlike a traditional studio, they do not feel the need to ensure its success because they have the additional capital to fall back on. On one hand, this allows them to fund projects that are more niche and a higher risk to traditional studios, but audiences are ultimately the ones who suffer because this environment with immediate access on streaming also becomes paradoxically limiting because those same companies have little incentive to pursue physical media or other avenues or platforms for release. Sure, Road House is probably not going to be a work studied and cited as extensively as The Seventh Seal (1957) or Citizen Kane (1941), but if Amazon Studios were to go dark – or a more likely scenario, the internet is temporarily down at the house for whatever reason – these titles can essentially disappear. Even for a low-brow work such as this, that loss of culture would be a real shame but that is a risk we take as we allow these conglomerate companies to be stewards of anything besides their bottom line.