Sunday Movie Review: Road House

AfricanBrew Rating: 3/10

Welcome to the 21st century, affectionately known as the "Great Hollywood Garage Sale," where original scripts are as rare as an A-lister at your local coffee shop. In today's film industry, it seems the recipe for success is simple: take an old hit, add a pinch of modern technology, stir with a big-budget star, and voilà—you've cooked up a box office smash. So, if you've got a sense of déjà vu at the movies, it's not you—it's just Tinseltown lovingly embracing creative "recycling." Get ready to see your favorite films like never before... and then again, and again.

"Road House" teeters precariously on the razor-thin line between "bad movie" and the utterly unwatchable. I almost passed on featuring it in this Sunday's column. It's not a film I'd recommend, but hey, beauty—or in this case, the lack thereof—is in the eye of the beholder. So, I'll take one for the team and dive into it, because what's cinema if not a wildly subjective spectacle? But fair warning from me and my fellow discerning cinephiles: this one's not going to make our favorites list.

The movie had an amazing marketing team and swindled me to sit down and waste my precious time. McGregor, it turns out, is a natural at playing a devilishly flamboyant villain, and manages to steal the show from a very grounded Gyllenhaal.

The movie tosses in everything but the kitchen sink—drugs, corrupt cops, hits, boats, and a shirtless Gyllenhaal doing pull-ups—into a plot that's not just hard to follow, but frankly, not the point. Despite the stakes being ostensibly upped by money, death, and kidnapping, they barely make sense. And at a hefty two-hour runtime, the film shows little interest in backstory.

Characters like flinty bartender Laura, a group of aspiring bouncers, a bookstore owner and his sharp daughter, and especially Dalton’s love interest Ellie—a nurse who barely manages to squeeze one personal question into their whirlwind romance—are introduced but remain painfully underdeveloped. Intriguing snippets, like Ellie’s mysterious family or a historic lineage of Black business owners, briefly surface only to be drowned out by the movie's louder elements. Why anyone stays in this town is anyone's guess—they probably lost the plot too.