The Road House Remake Is Much Darker Than The Original – Here's Why

As anyone who's seen it will attest, 1989's "Road House" is an odd movie. Starring the inimitable Patrick Swayze as a "cooler" named Dalton who's hired to run security for a small town bar, the film feels so niche, so specific, so delightfully bonkers that you almost can't believe people signed off on pumping millions of dollars into making it. There's an inherent goofiness to that version, even if the characters aren't winking at the audience. In many ways, it's a relic from a different era, and a modern remake of "Road House," like the one now available on Prime Video from director Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, was never going to be able to recapture the original's ineffable magic. I had some fun with the new version, but tonally, it's much darker than the first film. (And since the original featured a villain saying the line "I used to f*** guys like you in prison!" as a straight-faced threat to our protagonist, that's saying something.)

The reason it feels darker is because the new film falls into the trap of many modern Hollywood remakes or reimaginings: The filmmakers chose a gritty, realistic approach as the primary method of telling this story, which takes the audience out of that heightened, ridiculous, almost fantasy world of the '80s version and instead asks us to think about these characters as real people. But because this is a movie about guys who spend the whole movie getting in brawls, that means that this film feels more depressing and sad than the first version ever did. Instead of having that "can you believe what we're seeing?" feeling, we're now forced to contend with the mental states of these characters and engage with what's driving them to make the decisions they're making. The vibes of the original are traded for realism, which casts a shadow over the movie that the first film never had to shoulder. And nowhere is that better illustrated than in the character of Dalton.

Patrick Swayze had a certain charisma as a performer that shone through his "Road House" performance, even when doing something as ridiculous as ripping a man's throat out in a climactic fight. Yes, he kills some of the main villain's goons as he enacts revenge for the death of his friend, but as an audience, you never really got the sense that there was never any real danger of Dalton losing himself and taking things too far.

In this new version, though, Gyllenhaal's Dalton arguably does take things too far. Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that we've seen Gyllenhaal play a range of incredibly intense sociopaths or psychopaths on screen over the past 15 years, and that baggage bleeds over into seeing him enact his own type of revenge in the 2024 version of "Road House." When Dalton's switch gets flipped in this movie, it feels like Gyllenhaal could actually succumb to total darkness. Naturally, this shift in tone may work better for some viewers than it does for others (especially those who have never seen the original), but after watching this iteration, I think I agree with /Film's Chris Evangelista, who wrote a fantastic tribute to the original movie in 2021 and laid out a case for why it should never be remade. Doug Liman and his team moved forward anyway, but in the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park," perhaps they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

On today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, we had a spoiler-filled conversation about the new "Road House," Jake Gyllenhaal and Conor McGregor's performances, and more. Check it out:

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