Road House
Overview
Some bars need a bouncer. This one needs a former UFC fighter. Elwood Dalton, played by a very game Jake Gyllenhaal, takes a job at a roadhouse in the Florida Keys that has basically become a lawless fight club with a liquor license — nightly brawls, zero consequences, and a local crime boss, Ben Brandt, who'd like to keep it that way. Brandt's enforcer is Knox, played by Conor McGregor in his acting debut, swaggering onto the screen like he was born to be a movie villain. Dalton is hired to clean the place up, and his job sounds simple: stand at the door, throw out the trouble. But trouble in the Keys has money and muscle and no interest in leaving, and every attempt to keep the peace just raises the stakes. This remake of the 1989 favorite knows exactly what it is — a throwback to classic eighties action movies, all brutal fight scenes, cheesy dialogue and sun-bleached machismo. Gyllenhaal plays Dalton with an easy charm and a smile that makes the violence land harder: he's polite right up until he isn't. Nobody is reinventing cinema here, and that's the point. It's a cold beer of a movie, with a sequel already in development.
