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Before being dumped on Amazon Prime this past week, there were a lot of stories planted in the press about director Doug Liman boycotting the South X South West premiere of his Road House movie because Amazon MGM Studios refused to release it in theaters.
It sounded like fake news then, and having seen the movie, it sounds even more like a desperate attempt to try and generate some pre-release PR before word could get out that Road House is awful. A few years ago, this kind of garbage skipped theaters because it wasn’t good enough to draw people in, so it went directly to video, where it would spend a week on the New Release shelf at Blockbuster before making its way to the discount bin. Now, films this bad go to streaming services where they get promoted for a week or so, then disappear in the cloud with thousands of other products on the internet’s island of misfit movies.
In Road House, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dalton, an emotionally damaged ex-UFC fighter who gets hired to help a struggling bar owner clean the movie cliche riff-raff out of her establishment. When he’s not breaking the noses, arms, legs, and heads of any customer who gets out of line, Dalton trains his staff to break the noses, arms, legs, and heads of customers. What may sound like heaven to any action movie fan is hell because none of the fights in Road House are choreographed or filmed well. The bar for action film fights has been raised high in the past few years, largely thanks to the excellent John Wick franchise, so watching the fake fights in Liman’s movie is frustrating. And boring.
Gyllenhaal, who played boxer Billy Hope in the much better movie Southpaw (2015), sleepwalks through Road House, only showing emotion – or energy – in the flashback scenes where he’s fighting in a UFC title match. What happens in that fight would devastate anybody. Still, Gyllenhaal’s decision to show Dalton’s damage as “zombie with a pulse” is a poor choice, mainly since he plays it for the entire movie.
The bait that Road House uses to hook people in to watch it, beyond ripping off the much better original Road House movie from 1989 starring the awesome Patrick Swayze, is the stunt casting of MMA champion Conor McGregor as a bad guy named Knox. McGregor is one of the best at beating up real opponents in real fights but is one of the worst in fake movie fighting. You get the feeling watching him that he never worked with any of the fight choreographers and just started fake-wailing on everybody when Liman said action. It’s chaotic and dull at the same time. Then, when he’s not fighting, McGregor walks around like he’s got a broom jammed up his butt, mouthing lines that a schoolyard bully would be too embarrassed to use. It’s laughable, but not in the way McGregor or Limon expected. In a Good Morning Britain interview, the athlete boasted about his reported $5.5 million salary on the film, which made him the highest-paid first-time actor. (The Rock held the record for his $5.5 million payday for his debut in The Mummy Returns.) So McGregor gets the last laugh this time.
And the joke is on us for watching.
