Road House (1989)

I wanted to write about this movie Road House, released in 1989 and directed by Rowdy Herrington. I wanted to write about it as a challenge to myself, because this is such a stupid movie that could have been quite good, and the challenge is to articulate why that is the case. I’ve seen it several times; it was one of those movies that was all over the cable movie channels during my teen years, and I remember it well. I remember that it was a silly yet somehow entertaining movie, and I believed it was cheesy, but to my surprise, upon a recent rewatch, cheesy isn’t the word I would use to describe it. It isn’t anything like a cheesy movie with a cult fan base. No, it aspires to be a serious movie, I think, but aside from that it really doesn’t know what it is. Is it a redemption story? Is it a Rambo-esque action flick? Is it a gangster movie, if the gangsters were white Anglo-Saxon protestants? Is it a tale about enduring masculine friendship? What is this thing?

As plots go, it is perfectly serviceable. James Dalton, played by Patrick Swayze, works as a “cooler”, a tough-guy who manages the security at night clubs. While on duty at his current gig in New York, Dalton is approached by Frank, the owner of a road house called Double Deuce, located just outside of Kansas City. Frank wants to hire Dalton to clean it up, to class up the joint. Dalton names his terms, $5000 up front and $500 a day til the job is done, and Frank agrees. Dalton drives to Missouri. When he arrives, he finds the Double Deuce is exactly as Frank described it, the kind of club that has blood on the floors at the end of the night. Dalton takes charge, fires the useless personnel, and begins the cleanup job. One of those people he fired, though, a skimming bartender, just happens to be the nephew of the richest guy in town, Brad Wesley, which puts Dalton squarely in Wesley’s crosshairs.

Right way, during the first ten minutes of the film, we get some very good cinema, so good character development. We get that Dalton is a smart guy, and there’s something special and unexpected about him; people expect him to be a bigger dude, a line that comes up again and again. I like this quite a lot, and Swayze is able to carry it well. I completely buy that he’s not a guy anyone ought to fuck around with, a guy who is as savvy as he is good at fighting, a guy who has self control and purpose. I like this character, and I’m ready to see where this movie takes him, but here’s the problem: The Dalton at the beginning of movie, this calm, collected, world-wise, smart Dalton, and the Dalton at the end of the picture, a Rambo-esque action hero, are two totally different characters. It is as if the screenwriter could not figure out what to do with smart Dalton and said fuck it, let’s Rambo this shit. He goes from plausible to cartoonish during the two-hour run time. The setup is great, but the payoff is horseshit.

This good setup/horseshit payoff carries through with all of these characters, to the point that it is the dominant theme of the film. This meta-theme supercedes all of the films interior themes. That’s not good.

I’m just going to freestyle a bit here. Let’s take the villian, Brad Wesley, played by Ben Gazzara. Wesley is the town’s richest man, who somehow earns his money by extorting money from the town’s businesses, which the film points out in dialogue is somehow a legal scheme, inexplicably, because he’s just running a gangster protection racket. The FBI would be all over it, but in this movie there’s not a cop to be found. Okay, let’s keep on suspending our disbelief, see where this goes. In short order it takes Wesley from an eccentric millionaire with a screw loose to a mustache-twirling supervillain. He starts blowing up businesses and homes, and when he has his monster truck roll over the inventory at the local Ford dealership, again without a single policeman to be found, I burst out laughing. This film takes us from a solid piece of serious film-making, an interesting and indeed thoughtful setup, to a hilariously over-the-top action spectacle extravaganza, in Missouri. It makes no sense whatsoever.

I guess I’m going to make this same point over and over in this review: Good characters turned goofy. Good setup, terrible payoff. We get the very good love interest setup with Dalton getting in the panties of his doctor, played by the built-for-speed Kelly Lynch. She is set up so well as a smart, practical, and beautiful match to Swayze’s Dalton, and they have good on-screen chemistry to boot, and she becomes an irrational screeching harpy. Inexplicably.

Sam Elliott is in this, by the way, and who doesn’t love Sam Elliott? He’s wasted here, again with a great setup as Dalton’s mentor American-guru sort-of father figure, then reduced to nothing more than a murder victim so that Dalton can go into his hyper-violent Rambo-esque killing spree. Great setup, horseshit payoff.

Roadhouse, until it becomes a cartoon, had all the potential in the world. One really wonders, what the hell did they think they were doing? What happened? Nothing about it makes any sense whatsoever, but one can sort of reason that maybe during dailies the director and producers were saying things like, we got to beef up the action in this. We need more explosions, man. More fights! More tits! Monster trucks are huge right now, so let’s get us one of those Bigfoots. This thing is far to serious, and we’re going to lose our asses! Words like that were probably spoken. I don’t know.

The thing about it is that for a solid two-thirds of the film, it is pretty damned good, and then it just goes off the rails into garish spectacle. Road House, for the most part, isn’t a bad movie, but it is the kind of movie that, if I were in it, I would find embarassing. I can recommend it only as a clinic, as an example of a film that starts off strong, but ends up imploding, as an example of how not to make a film, as in, class, how could we revise this picture to make it good? I could see that being a really good day in film school.