Road House: Jake Gyllenhaal's Remake Reclaims The Highway To Hell

YOU’VE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE. A troubled beast with a past gets a second chance. He gets a bouncer gig in a small town. He becomes a cult figure there, fending off baddies and turning into an unlikely messiah. Rescues their favourite bar. Meets a pretty woman. Befriends a book-loving little girl. All is good — until it’s not. Land sharks bring out the big guns. Beast suffers; town suffers. His adopted life is attacked. Everyone gets hurt, lots of blood and explosions, but the day is just about saved. With Doug Liman’s Road House, you’ve literally seen it all before. The brooding drama is a remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze-starrer of the same name — where a feral outsider named Dalton tames his demons in a new setting.

Dalton is Jake Gyllenhaal here, possibly the only choice to play a man who swings between ballistic and balmy with alarming ease. Gyllenhaal has played a haunted bruiser before in Southpaw, but Road House sees him take it up a few notches. The only fear Dalton feels in this familiar anti-fairytale is the fear of him losing control. He does not want to be pushed to his tipping point. He’s the incredible hulk parading as a human. Or, in this case, a predator posing as a person. Which brings us to why Road House is not your usual bone-crunching actioner.

The immersive set pieces and stunts aside, the answer lies in the way it adapts the original film. It’s a refreshing update of a formula that often seems to be defined by how no dark knight is beyond redemption; everyone, and everything, is salvageable. The Dalton of this film is a former UFC middleweight fighter who quit the ring after killing — or perhaps murdering? — an opponent. He doesn’t mind exploiting that reputation either, earning his money by scamming fighters on the underground MMA circuit. As a bouncer hired to guard a popular Florida Keys roadhouse from unruly clientele, he always seems to be suppressing his natural instincts — he takes it easy, treating the ‘disciplining’ as a light workout, even being nice enough to take the hoodlums to the hospital. He trains a few younger waiters to do the job so that he can keep his hands clean. This is only because of the aforementioned fear: He does not want the dormant monster to emerge from within. He does not want to relapse.

If anything, these lethal rage issues are an indictment of a sport — and a genre of living and movies — that thrives on legal violence. This is further shaped by the presence of former UFC champion Conor McGregor as a muscled madman hired by the villains to counter Dalton. He’s brute force, nothing else. McGregor hams the hell out of the role, but you can also tell that he’s sending up his own identity. These are crazed people who’d be institutionalised in a normal world — and Dalton is aware of this. His own bloodlust is not romanticised by the film. He resists romance and human connection because he knows that he doesn’t deserve it. He resists becoming a story because — as he tells the little girl obsessed with stories — he does not feel worthy. He is almost trying to reclaim his murky morality from the medium that simplified it.

The 1989 movie has a happily ever after of sorts. After initially getting freaked out by his ways, Dalton’s lover eventually forgives him. He stays back. But this movie is intent on distinguishing between madness and justice; lines and boundaries. He cannot undo who he is — and she cannot unsee what he does. At one point, Dalton loses it and becomes a cold killing machine. He’s going after the evil folks, sure, but if his actions are viewed in isolation, he resembles a sinister serial killer. He seems to be getting off on the rampage. That he is morally superior is only a matter of circumstance.

And that’s the point of this update: Protagonists like Dalton cannot merely settle down and adopt a new identity. They cannot simply get the girl and save the day. Being a paid protector doesn’t absolve them of their sins; the debt is far deeper. Presenting him as a disgraced fighter is a way of implying that salvation is not some flimsy narrative device; the sport rewards unhinged minds and bodies, and this is one of the few stories that addresses its complicity in the real world. Salvation, instead, has to be earned by people who are capable of not just change but restraint. Dalton might be a hired predator, but he’s still a predator. He doesn’t entirely succeed at protecting the bar either. And what sane woman would choose a man who snaps someone’s neck into two — and says sorry? There’s no way back from that, certainly not in 2024. They’re about as compatible as King Kong and Ann Darrow.

To Gyllenhaal’s credit, he infuses Dalton with the kind of muted ugliness that makes it hard to trust — or root for — the guy. It also milks our perception of his creepy turns in movies like Nightcrawler and Velvet Buzzsaw. An hour into the film, the fabled crocodile of the town makes an appearance. It drags down a bully who falls into the water while fighting Dalton. In a way, the crocodile is a hero because it ate up a bad man. But all it’s really doing is satiating its hunger. Its previous meal was an innocent dog. And its next could be whatever it’s fed — and anything it finds. Dalton would know.

Stream Road House here.