Road House (2024)

Plot of Road House: Elwood Dalton a retired cage fighter is hired by Frankie a bar owner on Glass Key Florida as a bouncer because she is plagued by violence. Dalton has suicidal tendencies and accepts the job after almost allowing himself to be run down by a train. He is soon faced with a group of villains working for Brandt a crooked boss with ambition in land development, but injures them all and takes them to hospital where he meets Ellie, an attractive doctor who we are to find out, is Brandt’s daughter. The agro against the Road House increases and Brandt hires a psychopath in the same mold as Dalton leading to him being beaten and intending to leave town. But when he finds that his friends who run the book shop have been hospitalised and their shop burnt down, he changes his mind. Brandt claims to have taken Ellie hostage in exchange for a chest of money which Dalton has found which leads to a confrontation on Brandt junior’s catamaran. People die but it is not all over.

Content: No sex or nudity, some drinking – it is set in a bar after all.  Knox. The enforcer appears first naked walking down a street, until he steals a coat off a passer by. It is a weird scene. There are flashbacks to Dalton’s past where he has killed a man in the ring due to rage. We see his car being destroyed by a train. Once in the Road House there are frequent fights which escalate over time. A whole lot of different, real bands play in the Road House, some of them pretty good. Dalton lives on an old boat owned by the bar owner, and when attacked by the gang leader, pushes him over the side where the man is eaten by a crocodile. There are speed boat scenes a bit like James Bond.

A View: I did not understand what this film was on about until I read a bit about it to find that it was a remake of the 1989 cult classic. The earlier film had been panned by the critics but had been a hit with audiences making a lot of money. This film was always going to go straight to streaming, in part because it was thought that it might be unfavourably compared with the original. But as it turns out, it worked pretty well within its own standards. This cage fighting looks awful but most of the film is set up for entertainment rather than agro. So a watch if you like that sort of thing.

Fun Fact: The Road House was built from scratch in the Dominican Republic, sufficiently well to withstand a hurricane.