Road House: a remake that 'strips a cult classic for parts'

Starring Patrick Swayze as the bouncer with a past, who is hired to restore calm to a rough roadside bar in Missouri, "Road House" was slated by many critics when it came out in 1989, "but has since become a cult favourite", said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. 

Now, we have a loose remake, starring a "ridiculously buff" Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role. He plays Elwood Dalton, a mixed martial arts champ whose career ended after he "pummelled an opponent to death". Elwood is inhabiting a seedy world of bare-knuckle boxing when he is persuaded by Frankie (Jessica Williams) to come and drive the brawling bikers out of her beach bar in Florida (which is called Road House, but isn't one). Cue a host of fight sequences in which Elwood breaks arms, cracks heads and sends bodies flying. It's all watchable enough, but the punch-ups are not as well choreographed as in the original, and though it contains decent lines, the film as a whole contrives to be both mindless and over-complicated, with lots of characters and subplots that are thrown in, but not developed.

In his review of the original "Road House", Roger Ebert concluded that it sat "right on the edge between the 'good-bad movie' and the merely bad", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. This film is neither "good-bad" nor "merely bad", just a bit dull. "The most pointless sort of remake, it takes a cult classic and strips it for parts, reformulating them into just another broad, interchangeable action film".

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I quite enjoyed it, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman; but it "gets silly" when the Irish MMA star Conor McGregor appears, playing a psychopath. He is "so devoid of acting talent, he can't even make his genuine Irish accent sound plausible".