ROAD HOUSE (2024)

Name: ROAD HOUSE (2024)
Item: ROAD HOUSE (2024)
Author: Lillie Jaenchen

"Two Hours of Dumb Action Fun"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

ROAD HOUSE is an amped-up Amazon Prime reboot of the 1989 action movie starring Patrick Swayze. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dalton, a traveling bar bouncer who gets an offer from a woman named Frankie who owns a rowdy bar called the Road House in the Florida Keys. She wants Dalton to tame her raucous patrons. Dalton takes the gig, leading to a series of fights that quickly spread his reputation. A female doctor gets upset with him for cluttering her ER, but she’s also attracted to him. Dalton eventually must protect the bar from the bratty son of an imprisoned crime kingpin who wants to turn the Road House into a secret port for smuggling guns and drugs.

The new ROAD HOUSE is a great deal of fun for most of its run time and its almost nonstop fights and action sequences. However, the last half-hour is marred by obvious CGI effects that lose the original movie's earthy charm. Jake Gyllenhaal deploys his trademark sarcastic grin to great effect, but ROAD HOUSE has a profusion of strong foul language and very strong violence.

Content:

(B, LLL, VVV, S, N, AA, DD, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Light moral worldview where a man is hired to be a bouncer at a road house in the Florida Keys and winds up fighting bad guys trying to control the business to run drugs, plus hero is kind to side characters;

Foul Language:

At least 116 obscenities (including 85 “f” words) and seven GD profanities;

Violence:

Frequent, violent mixed martial-arts fighting with punching and kicking and throwing and some blood, several fight scenes are played for laughs as the hero breaks bad guys’ bones, several stabbings (mostly non-fatal), two houses and a bookstore are burned to the ground by arsonists, a car hits a man purposely, there’s a high-speed boat chase, man in impaled with wooden stakes, and a giant crocodile eats a man, plus most of the violence cuts away from moments of impact and only blood smears are seen, not gushing blood;

Sex:

No sex;

Nudity:

A villain is seen walking nude from behind, with full rear nudity, for an extended scene as he storms naked through an open-air market, and shirtless men appear throughout the movie, usually as they are fighting;

Alcohol Use:

Very frequent drinking, often to excess, is shown throughout as the movie takes place in a wild bar;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking, but the villain wants to set up a drug operation; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Several people’s homes or businesses are destroyed by fires caused by the villains.

More Detail:

An amped-up reboot of the 1989 action-movie classic of the same name, ROAD HOUSE finds Jake Gyllenhaal bringing his offbeat appeal and plenty of brawn to the role of Dalton, a traveling bar bouncer played by Patrick Swayze in the original. Streaming on Amazon Prime, ROAD HOUSE is more exciting to watch for its action sequences, yet less lovable than the scruffy original, and has a profusion of strong foul language and excessive violence.

Dalton first shows up at an underground brawl in which one ruthless fighter has taken down six opponents in quick succession, but when the fighter sees Dalton reveal himself from under a hoodie, he runs away scared and refusing to battle, leaving Dalton with a pile of cash that he didn’t even have to throw a punch to win.

It’s a good setup to make viewers wonder what about Dalton could terrify others, but it also leads to an after-match offer by a woman named Frankie (Jessica Williams), who owns a wildly rowdy bar called the Road House in the Florida Keys. She wants Dalton to restore order and tame her patrons.

Dalton takes the gig, leading to a series of fun fights that quickly spread his reputation throughout his new environs. A particularly funny and thrilling scene features Dalton taking down a gang of drunkards with medical precision, then driving them to an ER himself to get a broad array of casts.

It’s there that a doctor named Ellie (Daniela Melchior) is upset at him for cluttering her ER while tending to a stab wound of his own. While she’s upset with him, Ellie is also attracted to him. On a far more sinister note, Dalton has also attracted the attention of a bratty bad guy named Brant, the son of an imprisoned local crime kingpin who wants to take over the Road House as prime land for both a resort and secret port for smuggling guns and drugs.

When Brant’s usual crew of baddies can’t win their fights with Dalton, his father calls upon a ruthless international tough man named Knox (real-life UFC champion Conor McGregor) to take him out once and for all.

Can Dalton defeat the fearsome Knox and save Road House from the clutches of Brant?

The new ROAD HOUSE is a great deal of fun for most of its run time, and it’s almost nonstop fights and action sequences, although the last half-hour is marred somewhat by obvious CGI effects that lose the original movie’s earthy charm. Gyllenhaal deploys his trademark sarcastic grin to great effect throughout, and his ability to describe the bones he’s breaking to the villains as they receive their beatings is often funny.

Director Doug Liman thankfully leaves most of the potentially gruesome injuries to the viewers’ imagination, using cutaways to keep the movie’s bloodletting to a minimum. He also keeps the budding relationship between Ellie and Dalton at a cute relaxing level, in contrast to the original movie’s graphic sex scene.

ROAD HOUSE is a highly entertaining two hours of dumb action fun, with a light moral worldview. However, it has a profusion of strong foul language and excessive violence; thus, ROAD HOUSE is excessive.

Watch ROAD HOUSE (2024) →

Quality:

- Content: -3