Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniela Melchior, Billy Magnussen, Jessica Williams, some other people I can't be arsed to name and Conor McGregor. Written in crayon on the back of an empty fag packet by five people, three of whom came up with the story while two them wrote the sodding screenplay. Story credits goes to Anthony Bagarozzi, Charles Mondry and David Lee Henry, while the screenplay goes to Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry and it was based on an original script by David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin. The whole mess was produced by the once great and legendary Joel Silver and the resulting dollop of generic shit was directed by Doug Liman. Plus it's over 2 hours long.
The story, sees a former MMA fighter, Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) hired by a supporting actress to be her head of security at her Key West seafront dive bar called the Road House. He turns up, makes some friends, drinks loads of coffees and lives on a boat. Then a bunch of biker guys turn up to mess shit up, Dalton puts them in hospital and then has to deal with their boss, an entitled mob bosses son called Bill Brandt (Billy Bagnussen) he wants the bar so he can build his father's beach front super hotel on it. Anyway, because his gang of hired thugs is so useless, Dad send his best psychopath, Knox (Conor McGregor) to kill everybody. In between the bland, CGI-assisted generic fights, Dalton sort of falls in love with a doctor, Ellie (Daniela Melchior) who works in the local hospital that Dalton sends all the men he's crippled to for treatment. Her dad is the corrupt local sherif.
There follows the usual tropes of kidnap, blackmail, shootouts and fist and foot fights in, on and outside the bar, where bottles are thrown as well as fists and boots as Dalton works his way through the hired help until the showdown with Knox, a showdown so dull and boring that there then needs to a second climax, onboard a yacht to finish it all off with a pathetic wimper.
Whereas the original starring Patrick Swayze was no great shakes it's a goddam classic masterpiece compared to this, lazy, generic, bland sac of shit.
Jake is a likeable enough actor, and he's certainly hench, my god he's 42 and he's ripped to the tits with muscles, but he's given such a character with a massive black hole of a personality that there's really nothing you can say about him. Sure he suffers from PTSD from a fight where he killed someone, but apart from that he's a walking vacuum of emotion. Conor McGregor could easily murder a paper bag, but he sure as shit couldn't act his way out of one. He by far the worst thing in this, which is saying something.
Christ, I dozed off an hour and woke up at the climax and then had to rewind to go back to where I'd fallen asleep, this I did but discovered that I just didn't care about any of it. It just struck me as a waste of talent, I mean Joel Silver, Doug Liman and Jake Gyllenhall and this is the best you can come up with.
If you have the urge to see this, do yourself a favour and watch the original instead, it's shorter by a whole seven minutes, stars Ben Gazzara and the fights are excellent.
Bland, generic and what's the word? Oh yes, rubbish.
4/10
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