Posted on 3.21.24: “Everything I’ve worked for [is gone]…over a fucking bouncer!”
I liked Doug Liman’s half-dopey, self-satirizing Road House much, much more than Rowdy Harrington’s 1989 version.
I don’t remember Harrington’s film being even randomly amusing, but Liman’s is occasionally hilarious, especially during the last half-hour, a CG extravaganza that plays like a kind of aquatic Road Warrior.
Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Elwood Dalton is a kind of grinning, shoulder-shrugging Shane-like figure — a deadpan space-case with a dry sense of humor, and some guilt by way of Robert E. Lee Prewitt thrown into the mix — a soft-spoken Zen guy with a fear of his own rage — a dude with an undertow of depression who almost wipes himself out on a rural railroad track at the very beginning but then goes “aahh, maybe not.”