Yeaaaah, man.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIt was inevitable, then, that at some point there would be a remake. That point is now, with the release of <\/span>Road House<\/span><\/i> (2024), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Doug Liman. Both Gyllenhaal and Liman are, in their own ways, formidable Hollywood talents. Liman is the director of enjoyably punchy blockbusters like <\/span>Mr. & Mrs. Smith<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Edge of Tomorrow<\/span><\/i>. Gyllenhaal, at 42, is perhaps the quirkiest of today’s early middle-aged male movie stars. No one will ever recreate Swayze’s particular charisma, his blend of dancer’s physicality and proto-bro zen, but Gyllenhaal has an offbeat charm of his own. And like Swayze in his prime\u2014more so, frankly\u2014he’s outrageously ripped.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe new Road House, then, is mostly a movie about Gyllenhaal, once again playing a famous bouncer named Dalton, taking his shirt off and beating the crap out of other dudes while saving a bar\u2014now based in the Florida Keys\u2014from a rapacious local businessman (<\/span>Billy Magnussen<\/span>) and his army of thugs. It’s amusing at times, with Gyllenhaal playing Dalton as laconic and understated, in contrast to the outsize shenanigans of the baddies around him. The movie’s best moments are its weirdest\u2014odd one-liners, an offbeat henchman, a not-quite-random attack by a crocodile.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut the CG-assisted fight scenes are too slick, with whip pan, digitally stitched-together photography that doesn’t show off the performers’ physicality. That’s a shame, since the movie has also given Dalton a new backstory as a UFC fighter, and cast UFC fighter Conor McGregor as the scenery-chewing tough guy Knox. Aside from the crocodile gag, the Florida setting is under-utilized, and the oddball characters at the bar don’t make much of an impact. The movie feels stuck in the no-man’s-land between quality blockbuster filmmaking and trashy direct-to-streaming action. It’s perfunctory, and I can’t imagine watching it again even once, much less over and over as a late-night indulgence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe new <\/span>Road House <\/span><\/i>is not a bad movie, exactly, but it’s not a particularly good one either\u2014and, rather disappointingly given its heritage, it’s certainly not so bad it’s good.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe post Patrick Swayze's <i>Road House<\/i> Defined the So-Bad-It's-Good Movie. The Remake? Not So Much.<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A just-good-enough remake fails to live up to its predecessor. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[10,19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100044"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}