I have a pet theory that the first draft of the original Road House was a dry workplace drama that was just the life of a guy hired to bring order to an outlaw bar. Like Kitchen Nightmares with slightly more violence. Someone read it, said "what if we gave it a villain?" and we got Brad Wesley, the greatest, least ambitious gangster in the history of cinema.
That workplace drama bit stuck around, though! It's a huge part of the movie's lasting appeal. At its core, it is literally a movie about bouncers running off the lowlifes so their boss can build a bigger, better club that douchey people from the city would come to. Watching the Double Deuce slowly transform from a "place where they sweep the eyeballs up after closing" into what looks like a pretty damn nice club was compelling. Watching Dalton teach these guys how to handle rowdy customers in a better way was compelling. It didn't matter that you had Bubba Soprano and Redneck Richie Aprile on the fringes shaking down the guy at ABC Auto Parts. We'd deal with that later. Right now, we got a bar to save.
People remember Road House for the action, for "I used to fuck guys like you in prison" and for the baffling addition of Dalton having a compulsive urge to do throat surgery without anesthesia. Those are the bits that make that movie entertaining on its own and they're the bits I would have tossed for a remake. I would have kept the workplace drama aspect, tweaked Bubba Soprano and Redneck Richie to be a bit more Florida Man and generally come with different ways to B-movie up the Bar Rescue of it all. Hell, I would have brought in the dude from Bar Rescue to do a cameo just to drive it home.
I can't stress enough how annoyed I am that Dalton never cleans up the bar in the remake. They made it most of the way through phase 1 and then Conor McGregor shows his literal ass, derailing the rest of the movie into a directionless clown show. He's harder to understand than Bane and I have to think it's because Limon was trying to mask how fucking awful he was for this entire movie. They showed him Fast X and said "be Mamoa" but because McGregor could never, we get a mumbling mess of a character who only exists because McGregor does at least sell the action well. It all culminates in the wettest wet fart of an ending that I've seen in a while.
If you're wondering why I have so much to say about a forgettable remake of a b-movie classic, it's because there's so much unmined gold in this script. Their dryly sarcastic take on Dalton worked for me way more than it didn't. Explainer Biker was funny, every time. The staff at the Road House (and the running gag around its name that stopped running after its second use) were likeable and fun.They cast Joaquim de Almeida as a crooked cop and did fucking NOTHING with him. Jessica Williams is funny as hell and no one who discovers her through this movie will know that. They spend the first act setting up a cast of characters that I'm ready to drink with and then the two acts taking a shit on that good will. There's a man-eating crocodile introduced in the first act that we never see and barely speak of again. How do you not incorporate that into your finale? Doug Limon should be kissing Amazon's ass for not putting this in theaters. They saved him a ton of embarrassment.
