‘Road House’ review: Jake Gyllenhaal remake is less loony, more violent
nypost.comthe setting of “Road House” from Missouri to the Florida Keys should go down as one of the best decisions made by a movie remake ever.The scenery is tropical, the personalities are oversize and the area inspired a song that goes, “Wasted away again.”Plus, as any skimmer of crime headlines knows, macho bar brawls are not uncommon in the boisterous Sunshine State.
Really, this action-packed update of the truly ridiculous 1989 film that starred Patrick Swayze as the world’s best bouncer could almost be a documentary.
Call it “Florida Man: The Motion Picture.”The beefcake Swayze role, Dalton, is taken over by an intense Jake Gyllenhaal in this entertaining and, for better or worse, less mockable update of the cult classic.
Rather than having a black belt in karate and a Ph.D. in philosophy from NYU (what a movie it was), here Dalton is, more logically, a former UFC fighter named Elwood Dalton who’s recruited by Frankie (Jessica Williams) to calm down her notoriously violent watering hole in Glass Key.“The owner’s having a little trouble, I guess,” he tells a local bookseller. “I’m here to clean it up.”No longer the Double Deuce, the establishment is simply called — drumroll, please — the Road House.“It’s a roadhouse, but it’s called theRoad House,” Frankie says, mocking the film’s two-word title. “My uncle had a unique sense of humor.”And there’s a lot more blood on the floor for Dalton to contend with this time.
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