MovieChat Forums > Road House (2024) Discussion > Just No Good Versus the 1989 Original

Just No Good Versus the 1989 Original

posted 2 months ago by roger1 (2524)
3 replies | jump to latest

I will open by saying that I think most SEQUELS are not good movies. Truly great classic movies -- or even just good ones -- tell a story that is supposed to end, a unique period in the life of the characters, some of whom die. Best Picture winner Godfather II and Aliens are about the only really classic sequels ever made(that I can think of right now)...and Godfather II made less than half the gross of The Godfather, and, IMHO, is not as good AS The Godfather.

Remakes are another matter. Remakes generally tell the same great story, but again, for new audiences. As Denzel Washington said about his remake of The Manchurian Candidate: "if its good enough for Shakespeare with Hamlet, its good enough for me."

But The Manchurian Candidate remake was not nearly as good as the original and the lesson taught there was -- "movies arn't plays, they contain the time and place of their making within them."

Remakes GENERALLY aren't as good as the originals, but there have been some remakes I really liked: True Grit. The Magnificent Seven. The Ladykillers(with far better matte shots and special effects that the rather cheapjack British original.)

I think the original Cape Fear is a LOT better than the Great Scorsese's remake -- but that remake WAS a huge hit and DeNiro was something else in it(getting the Oscar nom that Robert Mitchum missed in the original.)

Which brings me to Gyllenhaal's Road House remake.

The original is from 1989 and has a reputation as a "bad movie" that nonetheless had all the ingredients for a cult camp classic. It was a big budget A movie attempt in the 80's to replicate a Southern states drive-in distribution good ol' boy exploitation film of the 70's.

But people may forget this: The movie had Joel Silver as a producer(more on HIM anon) and a Michael Kamen score, which made it EXACTLY like two more famous Joel Silver/Michael Kamen movies before it:

Lethal Weapon 1987
Die Hard 1988
Road House 1989

Yes..Road House was the third in a "late 80's action trilogy" and came looking just as polished and broad as the first two.

With a difference: a lot more T and A...and the T and the A were SHOWN. The movies have long ago left this kind of A movie exploitation for exploitation for exploitation's sake But it was fun to see it then -- there was definitely a "Playboy's Little Annie Fanny" aspect to the movie.

Patrick Swayze was eased into the kind of lead essayed by Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson right before him for Joel Silver. He just had the decent 1987 hit Dirty Dancing and was going to have the mega 1990 megahit Ghost. But those two movies revealed Swayze as more of a "male star for women" -- a romcom man -- than an action hero, and that rather hurt him here. Gibson or Willis...he was not.

So they provided him with an older co-star who WAS. The Great Sam Elliott, who somehow never became the John Wayne of the 80s, but still stole every movie he ever appeared in, while he was in it. Sam Elliott abides!

Elliott played the "good old gunslinger"(bouncer) who has mentored and now come to help his beleagured protege in his time of outnumbered need.

And the Jake G Road House fails here first.

The new story has been totally restructured that Jake G does NOT get an older mentor/buddy/brother figure/father figure partner. This proves a tremendous loss of what made the earlier film work. SPOILER for 1989: The bad guys killed Elliott so he couldn't help at the end. Swayze had to go on his final rampage of revenge all alone -- or did he? In any event, while he was on screen, Elliott stole the movie. His voice, his 'stache.

A "secret weapon" in 1989 Road House was Ben Gazzara as the kingpin villain. In 1989, Gazzara was rather a relic from the 50s and 60s, when he'd made his name as a surly murder suspect in "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959) and then as a 60s TV star on Arrest and Trial and Run for Your Life.

Gazzara was a pal of John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, and acted in some of Cassavetes movies.

He was, in short, "too good an actor" for Road House...but he didn't care and he ate up his villain part and now IMDb lists him as Ben Gazzara (Road House.) Its what he's most famous for. (The great early scene in Road House where Gazzara happily drives down a two-lane country highway swerving back and forth in BOTH lanes -- impervous to the crashes he might cause(including with Swayze) in a great "ode to tyrannical arrogance.")

The Jake G Road House replaces Gazzara's suprising charisma and swagger with..."Cliche Boring Young Villain 101A" -- the standard "Spoiled Young Punk Son of a Gangster" who clearly isn't as tough as his father(unseen in this movie.) We've seen THAT cliche young punk a million times (I'll quote John Wick, Eastern Promises and the Burt Reynolds movie Heat as examples.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (2524) 2 months ago

So, the count so far: no Michael Kamen score(OK, he's dead but not matched here) no Southern-fried T and A, no country music, no Sam Elliott(and no Sam Elliott-like friendship), no Ben Gazzara(whose middle-aged villain, established as a Korean War vet, showed surprising fighting skills against the younger Swayze at the climax..though of course, he has to cheat.)

But also: no cameraderie. In the original, Swayze's leader of young men shaped up a whole team of bouncers into his personal army (and fired those who were crooked or on drugs or oversexed on the job.) I think Jake G mentors ONE young overmatched pitiful bouncer in this one. I may be wrong. I started to lose interest. Plus in the original, at the road house Swayze also had a (real) blind honky tonk singer to befriend and a rather plain looking young female waitress as a pal, too. There is a LITTLE camarderie in the new Road House(the bar's owner -- a female POC where it was an older white Southern guy in the Missouri-set original) and some shopkeepers being bullied, but the "team" of the 1989 original is missing.

And how about the female love interest, in both films an emergency room doctor(to whom Swayze gives his carry-around medical chart when she looks him over, I don't recall that detail in the new one.) Kelly Lynch was a tall blonde drink of water(if not a beliveable doc) who "gave good nudity and sex scene"(further establishing Swayze's bonafides as a ladies man on screen.) The new actress is Hispanic (fine, its 2024) but plays more like Jake G's sister than his lover.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2524) 2 months ago

Joel Silver returned to produce this one, but it is indeed 25 years later, and he clearly knows its now 1989 anymore and so he seems to have willingly supervised a script that threw out just about EVERYTHING from the original in terms of look and sound and buddy-movie cameraderie and T and A and nudity and sex and...well, at lesat Jake G is STILL "the quiet guy whom no bad guys in group or solo can defeat or mess with"...

...except for Conor McGregor.

And THAT is the big separate, indeed entertaining selling point of THIS Road House. The movie is timely in making Jake G a UMC MMA fighter(with a death fight on his guilty conscience, natch) who can only POSSIBLY be taken down by..an even BIGGER, MEANER UMC MMA fighter.

Once you realize that this Road House is interested in dumping all those other great 1989 Southern-friend Die Hard elements in favor of building up to a mano-y-mano between one movie star and one UMC star with washboard abs and huge shoulders...its almost a little sad to realize that this Road House NEVER intended to give you the cheesy camp thrills of the original.

And its OK, but it sure takes a long slogging underwhelming time to get to the kind of fight we are very used to today, enhanced by a whole lottas CGI.

Note in passing: the Ben Gazzara villain in the original Road House was based on a REAL guy who so terrorized his small town that local merchants eventuarlly turned on him and killed him. This "merchant group to the rescue of Patrick Swayze" at the end of the original Road House continued that film's friendly obsession with friendship, camaderie and "having each other's back" -- kind of like a Western right? well, that's all gone in this one. And sorely missed. Conor McGregor can do a lot, but he can't replace all of that.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2524) 2 months ago

Points to the new Road House for its Florida Keys setting and ambiance but that too removes the "Southern friend hillbilly bikder bar ambiance of the original." And I found this new one WAY too dark to look at in all its night scenes. The 1989 Road House was a bright wide screen actioner in the Lethal Weapon tradition; this new one is dark and brooding and oh-so-slow getting where it needs to go.

Other than that, I certainly enjoyed the fights in the new Road House, Jake G doing the "quiet slow-simmering hero' thing done by hundreds of hunks before him(including Patrick Swazye), Conor's nutty villain, the inexplicable presence of long-forgotten 90s actor Joaquim de Almedia in a thankless crooked sheriff role(he plays a character called "Big Dick" and it just doesn't fit the suave guy), and a fast boat chase and fight straight out of the climax of Face/Off.

Not to mention what I took to be a twist ending post-credits scene.

But...it just ain't Road House.

And Sam Elliott was still availble.

PS. Both Sam Elliott AND Ben Gazzara(again playing a kingpin villain) were in The Big Lebowski. Quality control!