Blood, sweat and wet shirts

There is a somewhat dark but very true joke: when Hollywood is done making remakes of good films, it will move on to bad ones. Somewhere in the 1990s, this joke ceased to be so, when Hollywood began to create remakes of very odious films, such as, for example, "Women's Day" directed by Mair Zarki or "Maniac" by William Lustig. Sooner or later (however, it turned out really late), the desire to make a remake also arose in relation to the cult action movie of the era of video salons "Road House" directed by Rowdy Herrington and starring Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch. This tape, shot in 1989, first of all in the USA became the personification of the expression "so bad it's good", being one of the last chords of mainstream cinematic kitsch of the eighties, being somewhere next to "Cobra" by John P. Kosmatos or "American Anthem" by Albert Magnoli. The original Roadhouse, with its four Golden Raspberry nominations, middling box office and critical loathing, was a fairly straight-forward operation that wasn't afraid to be a single frame too wild, funny or dumb; sometimes it really seemed that Rowdy Herrington's default action movie couldn't be more different, as it absorbed every possible stamp of the masculine cinema of the 80s, with their cult of male power and, ultimately, disregard for the subjectivity of women. The 2024 remake, which became a major Amazon streaming hit, was directed by Doug Lyman, who is better known for his Jason Bourne tetralogy. The wide premiere of the film was preceded by a small scandal on the part of the director, who decided to publicly boycott his own tape due to disagreement with Amazon's policy regarding its release only on streaming bypassing cinemas, since the director believed that he was shooting the film purely for cinema viewing. Would the film become a hit at the box office? Honestly, not guaranteed. It is important to note that this boycott somehow managed to work as a form of PR, potentially drawing attention to the militant even those who are not his target audience. It is worth recalling the plot of the original and the remake, which underwent only cosmetic changes: former professional fighter Elwood Dalton is invited to work as a bouncer at a bar on a road course in Florida. Hoping to start a new life and forget about the past, the hero agrees to the offer. Gradually, he begins to restore order in this institution, which is known for its constant fights. But soon the local crime bosses start hunting for Dalton. Sweet Patrick Swayze was replaced by Jake Gyllenhaal, with a more flexible acting psychophysics. Elwood became James. Now the main character is not a professional thrower, but a mixed martial artist. Where in the original there was too much and the tape simply could not stop in time, the remake looks more conventional, respectable and - why not? — better, because the tape no longer has the same type of characters, whose images are written schematically and do not have any significant development in the finale. And, probably, the most important thing, namely the battle scenes, about which there are finally no complaints. It is the total absurdity of the staging of the fights in the original that still does not allow you to perceive it at least somehow normally, that is, without a constant hangover during viewing. The new "House on the Road" has interesting fights from the point of view of combat choreography, dynamism and adequate direction. With all these inputs, even Conor McGregor's debut can be considered a really good one, since McGregor does act, and it is his character in the remake that is responsible for the biggest game, which, however, does not go beyond common sense, if it was not strange in the context of this particular film. Doug Lyman created not so much a remake as a full-fledged revision of the cult action of the eighties, quite carefully correcting what even then was perceived as very funny, and something too ambiguous, such as the constant homoeroticism on the verge of foul play between the heroes of Swayze and Ben Gazzara. This does not mean that Doug Lyman's film has become more gloomy and serious. The new "Road House" is still the same entertainment attraction, but in which there is at least a minimal understanding of an adequate script and acting that does not turn into complete clowning. Does the film feel modern as such? And yes, and no. Of course, Doug Lyman did not make the film more pro-feminist, but the female characters in the film no longer look like some kind of pornographic function. The bar, around which the whole plot revolves, is owned by a woman - the dark-skinned character of the actress Jessica Williams. Somewhere in the background, there is still the character of Daniela Melchior - a typical zoomer, whose presence balances the openly hyper-macho world of the film. But if you don't take this into account, then the new "House on the Road" is a movie without any clear markers of time, unlike the original. This makes the film more universal, as Doug Lyman focuses on the theme of traumatic experiences and how certain psychological traumas of men become triggers of tragic or, as shown in "Road House", tragicomic events. There is nothing new in this, but compared to the complete ideological emptiness of the 1989 film, the 2024 film can be considered a step forward.