I vaguely remember the ad campaign for Road House way back when. It looked kinda cheesy, the kind of thing that was probably just banking on lead actor Patrick Swayze’s somewhat newfound fame following Dirty Dancing. Personally, I hadn’t seen that movie, and Road House looked like Swayze as a bouncer or something in a tough bar. That didn’t sound too interesting to me. As for Swayze himself, he generally struck me as a handsome guy who could dance. Charming, but not enough to interest me all that much. His movies looked like the sorts of movies that go straight to video these days.
However, Road House seems to be something of a minor hit these days. Maybe “cult film” would work better. Regardless, it did seem like good mindless fare for the weekend.
Dalton (Swayze) is apparently the best cooler in the business. Basically, he’s like a head bouncer who runs a club until he can clean up the place, then he moves on. Despite the title, he’s basically nonviolent for the most part, resolving problems with words when he can, the kind of man who reads philosophy books for fun and not much else. He gets an offer, in cash, to do his thing for the Double Deuce, a notoriously riotous bar in a rural Missouri town. The new owner, Frank Tilghman (Kevin Tighe), wants to make the place classy, and he’s willing to pay Dalton what it takes to get it. Dalton’s first night there shows customers who break out in a fight at the drop of a hat, drug deals on the club floor, and a host of other problems, but his central philosophy when dealing with customers is to always be nice and if violence is unavoidable to take it outside.
There’s just one small problem: the town is more or less run by the ruthless Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), and he doesn’t take too kindly to Dalton’s efforts to clean up the bar and somehow by extension the town. Dalton does have a dark secret, and he can handle himself in a fight if he has to, a major reason as to why he does what he can to avoid violence. All Dalton really wants to do is fix up the bar and romance a local doctor (Kelly Lynch), but when a number of the people he fired have connections to Wesley, and he doesn’t back down when Wesley’s muscle tries to intimidate him. Can Dalton clean up the town and make things better for the town while keeping to his own moral code?
Honestly, this one was cheesy, and the thing that got back to me the most was a very simple thought: these were some pretty small stakes. Wesley goes nuts because of a bouncer at the local watering hole? I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many buildings there are in the downtown section. His control over it seems childish and silly since, well, there wasn’t much of it on display. If I can’t really take the bad guy seriously, how seriously can I take the movie itself?
Granted, this is a pretty silly movie anyway. Swayze is a charming lead, and I always enjoy seeing Sam Eliot (here as a bouncer friend of Swayze’s), but the movie is basically just a bunch of people tossing out lines that are meant to sound deep but often aren’t as they fight over a whole lot of not much. I don’t think there’s anything particularly bad about Road House given the kind of movie it is, but I can’t bring myself to really recommend it as a must-see either.
Grade: C
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