Movie Review

Ripped Jake Gyllenhaal is the best part of stilted Road House remake

Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House.

Photo courtesy of Prime Video

Within the first five minutes of Road House, Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) “wins” a fight just by showing up and then intimidates another man who has just stabbed him by using just his words. A musclebound man not having to actually be violent is a solid start for the remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie, but as it turns out, it’s also the movie’s high point.

The film, streaming exclusively on Prime Video, doesn’t follow the exact plot of the original movie, but might have been better off if it did. In this version, Dalton is a down-on-his-luck former UFC fighter winning money in underground fights. That’s where Frankie (Jessica Williams) finds him, inviting him to be the bouncer at her road house in the Florida Keys to help control the rowdy clientele.

Dalton does his job a little too well once he arrives, sending a steady stream of toughs to the hospital, where he meets ER doctor Ellie (Daniela Melchior). He soon discovers that the near-constant fighting at the road house is not just people acting out while drunk, but a plot by local entrepreneur Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen) to drive the place out of business so he can build a resort on the prime property.

The filmmakers – director Doug Liman and writers Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry – have the clear intention of trying to make the film into cheesy fun, but they can’t seem to punch their way past just plain bad. Nothing makes sense in the set-up of the movie – why this town is full of aggro men, why multiple different bands continue to play music as the fighting rages, how Frankie can afford $5,000 a week to pay Dalton, and more. The movie moves from scene to scene quickly, so swiftly that it seems that the filmmakers don’t want the audience to think about anything too much.

Pretty much every character who isn’t Dalton comes off as strange, as if there was something in the water in the low-rent town that doesn’t allow them to act in a normal manner. The introductions for the characters are stilted at best, and the dialogue that Bagarozzia and Mondry have them say is just awful, with nothing coming close to being either clever or interesting. The script is so aggressively bad that it’s a wonder that a talented actor like Gyllenhaal would agree to be a part of the film at all.

Of course, the draw for a film like this is not characters talking, but the multiple fights between Dalton and anyone who crosses his path. While a few of them are solid, the random nature of the brawls prevents them from being effective overall. There is also some extraordinarily bad CGI used at certain points, moving characters or objects across the screen at lightning speed in a very distracting manner that offsets any excitement the scenes might otherwise have had.

Gyllenhaal’s ripped body is a special effect of its own, and he makes the most of his scenes despite the eye-rolling lines he’s occasionally required to say. Williams and Magnussen are better actors than they’re given a chance to be here. The inclusion of a non-actor like fighter Conor McGregor (Post Malone also makes a brief appearance) would normally be over-the-top fun, but his performance feels like it belongs it completely different type of movie.

Road House, which often seems to be as much about showcasing a series of random bands as it is about a seemingly invincible bouncer, comes nowhere close to matching the “so bad it’s good” nature of the original film. Instead, it’s just a bunch of quickly-edited scenes designed to give the impression that thrilling stuff is happening, a subterfuge that is easy to see past.

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Road House is now streaming on Prime Video.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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