Roadhouse (2024)

Not that anyone cares, but there is a remake of Roadhouse that Amazon Prime has allowed to skip theaters I might presume because the studio was smart enough to know that this pointless 80s nostalgia retread is a difficult sell over the sequel powerhouses of GHOSTBUSTERS or DUNE PART TWO or KUNG FU PANDA 4.  Therefore, I think streaming is just the right place for it.  It’s entertaining to a point but it’s never worth spending $15 for a night out.  Movies are expensive, you know.

This remake is, at least, not boring or pedestrian.  It certainly holds up the trashy end of this beefcake saga.  It’s the kind of movie where a guy is stabbed in the parking lot and then walks back to his car with the knife still in his belly and casually walks back to his car where he pulls out a roll of duct tape to temporarily stitch it up until he gets to a doctor.  Never in any of this does he flinch or reasonably howl in pain.  Bah!  Pain is for chumps!!

I love the guys in this movie.  They’re somewhere between UFC fighters and Logan from the X-Men.  They get hurt only when the plot requires it and the hero is only hurt when the drama dips into the All-Is-Lost moments.  Jake Gyllenhaal plays the Patrick Swayze character, a loner down in the Florida Keys with a dark past and a violent present trying to defend a bar from an endless stream of violent patrons who could stare down The Incredible Hulk

When the movie gets into its action scenes, it’s wildly entertaining.  But when it tries to tell a story, or build a character, it slows to a crawl.  And unfortunately, it crawls a lot.  I was bored most of the time but then another over-blown action scenes would break out and I was having fun.  Just not enough to recommend it without a fast-forward button.