I don’t watch a lot of bad movies, by design. I’m not a professional critic, so I don’t have to watch any of them, and it’s only fun to pick a movie apart once in a blue moon. I’m not talking about when I watch an acclaimed movie and just don’t like it, but about a movie everyone kind of agrees is bad, one that shows the studio behind it thinks that audiences are dumb and will fork over cash for anything.
After seeing a few clips on TikTok from the movie Road House that made me laugh, I figured I’d give it a whirl, since it was free for me on Amazon Prime Video anyway. It’s a bad movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former UFC fighter who now shows up at amateur fight nights as a ringer to make some cash; after one of those, he’s approached by Frankie (Jessica Williams), owner of a bar in the Florida Keys, who says she’s looking for a bouncer to deal with a group of thugs who are tearing up her bar night after night. Of course, he’s not interested, but after he tries to kill himself and bails at the last second, we see him arriving on a bus out in Frankie’s little town, where he’s greeted by a precocious teenager who runs a used book store with her dad, and then meets one uninteresting character after another before the fightin’ starts. Eventually, it turns out that the thugs aren’t just randomly harassing the Road House, but are doing so at the behest of an obnoxious nepo baby named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), so Dalton’s in deeper than he thought.
There isn’t much plot here beyond that, and that’s fine; I’d argue that Road House would be worse if they made the story any more complicated. This is an action movie, and action movies need two things: action, and quips. Gyllenhaal turns out to be really good at delivering some funny soliloquies before beating the shit out of people; the screenwriters didn’t make him some sort of closet intellectual – when Frankie says that Hemingway once drank at the Road House, Dalton isn’t impressed and just says “good for you!” – but made him just smart and funny enough to make him an interesting character to watch. He’s got a back story, of course, and we get most but not all of the explanation, which is also fine because who cares? Not every character in every movie needs a tragic back story.
After Dalton dispatches the first wave of thugs, Brandt’s imprisoned father, irritated that his son can’t get the job done, hires a guy simply named Knox (Conor McGregor, who lost a civil rape case in November), who has several tattoos on him that read “Knox” in case he forgets who he is. He’s indestructible, extremely violent, and permanently smiling. He’s also got quips. Dalton can’t handle him the way he handled all of the Brandts’ other goons, so we’re heading for a final showdown between the two of them for the fate of the Road House.
Gyllenhaal is a blast in this movie; he looks like he’s having fun, and he’s got that brooding charm that’s a cliché across action films, but everything about the performance is restrained (other than the beatings, which involve a lot of mediocre CGI). There’s a natural cadence to his delivery that sounds even more authentic when he’s surrounded by people who either can’t act or were told to act like they couldn’t act; nearly everyone else in this film is just bad, even when delivering minor lines. There’s just enough depth to Dalton’s character to make him compelling, and to make you understand why he always seems to stop short of the critical hit in every fight.
I also regret to report that Conor McGregor is really quite good as Knox. The character is a psycho, and McGregor seems to have no problem whatsoever slipping into that archetype. I wonder why. His ridiculous swagger plays well in fight scenes and regular ones, and he’s pretty good at delivering the quips we expect from this sort of character. Even his gait is funny. The film’s a year old, so I don’t think this is a big spoiler any more, but Knox survives the film and I imagine he’s going to be in the reported sequel, but I hope they get someone other than McGregor to play him – or just make up a thinly-veiled version of him to be the new antagonist.
Everything else about the movie is kind of bad. The dialogue from any character other than Dalton is stilted and overexpository; nobody talks like these people and I’m not referring to their accents. There’s so much explaining how this particular hamlet is a small place and everyone knows everyone and things are different here that I assume the screenwriters (or whoever cleaned up the script) think the audience is even dumber than the usual one. Did you catch that the previous three bouncers Frankie used at the bar had names starting with A, B, and C, before capital-D Dalton? Or did you guess who the sheriff actually was before it was revealed? I was mildly grateful that they kept the obvious romantic pairing at a very superficial level – they chose to make Dalton fairly uninterested in the character, who I haven’t even mentioned because she is so boring, which would have just been a distraction from the main throughline anyway.
So yeah, Road House is a bad movie. But I was entertained the whole time. I didn’t even mention that there’s some great live music from bands playing at the Road House, often up there while there’s mayhem a few feet away, or that one of the thugs ends up part of a great running gag with Dalton. It’s the best bad movie I’ve seen in a while. (Oh, and I’ve never seen the original, if anyone’s curious.)