Half-Assed Movie Reviews

December 13, 2008:  Road House

Readers who are new to Half-Assed Movie Reviews might wonder why the hell I would bother with a stupid 20-year-old movie that would be better left in the garbage pile of late-1980s cinema.  Readers who are familiar with my reviews will likely not be surprised.

Road House (1989) was released during the core of the career-high period for Patrick Swayze which spanned from his meteoric rise with Dirty Dancing (1987) through to the second-highest grossing film of 1990, Ghost.  He’d been around for years beforehand (notably as part of the crew of young up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders in 1983), and he’s still around, though he hasn’t worked much in recent years and is unfortunately now in poor health.  But he was, as it were, the “king of the world” for a few years back in the day.

Road House is the story of Dalton (Swayze), a legendary bouncer who is lured from his lucrative gig at a bar/nightclub somewhere in Middle of Nowhere, USA, to become the new head of security at another bar somewhere in the middle of nowhere.  He makes a splash early on, treats his coworkers with respect and starts to turn the place around and make it into a place where people want to go on a Saturday night.  We learn that Dalton the legendary bouncer (actually he calls himself a “cooler”, the guy who cools things down with sharp violence when the bouncers can’t keep things under control in a civilized way) is actually a protege of the totally bad-ass and even more legendary bouncer Garrett (Sam Elliott), who helps Dalton to work through his demons and helps out when he’s outnumbered.

But there’s a major problem with Road House.  It is only 1/3 of an awesome movie.  Everything I just described is executed beautifully, it’s energetic and crackling and takes advantage of Swayze’s talents and those of the supporting cast, it fits into the 1980s aesthetic, and we’re invested in what happens.  I’m talking about most of the first act of the movie, and other bits sprinkled throughout.

But 1/3 of a story does not a feature film make.

So, we get another 1/6 of the movie spent on a dull and completely unbelievable romantic side story with the ever-wooden Kelly Lynch.  And 1/2 of the movie is concerned with the main source of conflict, a cartoonish local gangster who is extorting money from pretty much every business in town and cutting off their supplies or torching their places of business when they don’t cooperate.  This is all just dumb and, aside from a few funny scenes, unwatchable.  It also results in Dalton’s apparent complete abandonment of his principles as soon as the going gets rough, and they’re back to destroying all the furniture and glassware in the bar by fighting every night instead of doing something more effective about defeating this local thug.  Of course, we need conflict in the movie, but this is totally not the way to do it.

So I found myself wanting to re-watch Road House, only to find myself disappointed after half an hour and wondering what ever made me think this was a good idea.  But here lies one of the keys to watching movies in the modern-day home setting.  You don’t need to watch the whole movie.  Ever.  I can pick and choose the parts I want, skip over parts I hate, and re-watch the scenes I love.  So for anyone who recalls Road House being a waste of time, you’re probably right overall, but I encourage you instead to revisit just 1/3 of the movie, and be happier that you’re seeing an incomplete story than if you had to sit through the whole thing.