With a new version of Road House having been released earlier this year on Amazon Prime Video, I thought this would be a great opportunity to watch the original film and see if it lived up to the appeal. Despite being critically panned upon release and earning five Razzie nominations, Road House has gone on to become a popular cult classic.
Eager to see whether the film lived up to the hype, I had hoped that the original version of Road House would at least be better than its remake, which, although competent, was fairly mediocre and uninteresting. Unfortunately, the 1989 Road House is an astoundingly boring film, with many of its scenes feeling like they’re lacking any sense of urgency.
The movie follows bouncer Dalton (Patrick Swayze), whose no-nonsense attitude leads to him being hired to oversee the maintenance of a rowdy bar called the Double Deuce. As Dalton ingratiates himself with the local community there and tries to clean up the bar’s reputation, he unwittingly becomes ensnared in crime lord Brad Wesley’s (Ben Gazzara) criminal enterprises. He’s also trying to overcome his guilt over his role in someone’s death, all while falling in love with local doctor Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch).
Already there’s potential for a number of interesting dynamics to play out. But outside of some decent yet unmemorable moments of humor, Road House has absolutely no idea what to do with its dramatic or romantic elements. For the vast majority of the film, I found myself waiting for the action scenes, which, to their credit, were quite fun to watch in how they captured the rowdiness of a bar fight. That said, the choreography of these fights is quite artificial-looking: at times it’s impossible not to recognize that a punch or kick doesn’t appear to have landed anywhere near its target.
But it’s the rest of Road House that leaves much to be desired. There were a number of moments where the characters felt like cardboard cutouts, in which they were standing around aimlessly, waiting for something in this lackluster story to happen. There’s a palpable awkwardness to these scenes, especially when the film is so insistent on showing how enraptured Dalton’s enemies and allies are by him. Some of them are so smitten by this protagonist that you could be fooled into thinking this was a Contagion-like infection story about a man who has created a love potion to trick strangers into falling in love with him.
This kind of cheesiness works well enough when the film often isn’t trying to take itself too seriously, but that doesn’t excuse the intensely boring stretches of Road House where it feels like nothing is happening. Brad Wesley is given a fun introductory scene, in which he veers across both lanes with careless abandon, far too wrapped up in his self-centredness to consider the harm he could cause. It’s a gleefully demented action for a crime boss to indulge in, setting up a crazed villain who will inject some much-needed chaos into the film, but the rest of Road House gives him very little to work with.
Whether it’s through Dalton’s blossoming relationship with Elizabeth or his love for the local community, there are opportunities for the film to demonstrate the protagonist’s back-and-forth struggle to forgive himself for his past and move on with his life. But Road House squanders this potential since there isn’t a single compelling line in Dalton and Elizabeth’s romance. As for his backstory and how it continues to haunt him, I appreciate that the film didn’t hammer home this tragic past with endless flashback scenes, but with the rest of the experience being so lackluster, I almost wish it had taken the cheaper route of showing us these flashbacks, if only to provide something worth watching.
Though Road House’s opening scene bears a lot of promise, as do the movie’s setups, the original version is outshone by its remake. The Doug Liman-helmed remake has its own flaws, but it’s at least somewhat competent, a quality that is severely lacking in this film.