Road House
Sometimes a movie is made that breaks all the rules and defies all the conventions of screenwriting, story, dialogue, action, and character development, and while it may be dismissed by many mundane thinking type people as being “corny”, “cheesy”, or even “stupid”, there’s just something about the excessively glorious, gratuitous nature of the whole thing that in the end can only be described as “incredibly entertaining”. While many correctly so would apply that description to so called “B-movies”, there was one such movie released in 1989 that was considered a big budget, A list affair, and yet was so shamelessly exploitative in its own wild, absurd nature, that it broke away from many so called “straight” movies in the pack to become a massive cult classic and is still considered a major influence on over the top action films to this day. It stars the late, great Patrick Swayze (upon which this film became a major tack to hang his legend on), at the time arguably America’s leading heartthrob coming off the enormous success of Dirty Dancing and using that to segue into the realm of rough, tough action movie hero albeit through a character so unusual in his philosophy on life that he embodies a totally original creation. Swayze plays Dalton, a badass professional Head Bouncer with a reputation that’s spread far and wide in the world of bar patrons, employees, and owners as a guy that’s managed to successfully clean up and regulate every roughhouse bar with the vision and the dollars to bring him in to do so, and we first see him watching over a large, rowdy, yet peaceful establishment before a fight breaks out and he gets slashed with a knife removing the offending parties before stitching the wound up himself! For Dalton, bouncing and keeping the peace is like an art form, a type of skilled labor where one’s own self discipline is just as important as one’s level of skill at hand to hand combat. Approached at his current gig by a Midwestern bar owner (Kevin Tighe) looking to bring him in to clean up his own violence filled place of business, Dalton names his price, gets it, and then drives out to his new bar and observes the activity there, not liking what he sees. The current Head Bouncer (Terry Funk) enjoys bashing in skulls more than the miscreants that he’s trying to keep out, the waitress is openly running a drug dealing operation out of the women’s bathroom, and the bartender is skimming out of the cash register on a nightly basis. All of them must go, but the bartender poses a problem due to him being the nephew of the town’s richest man, a proper money bastard played by Ben Gazzara. While the concept of “wealthy, white, male villain” is nothing unfamiliar to these sort of movies, Gazzara really does bring a whole new edge to it, playing his Brad Wesley as a guy who never loses his cool and remains congenial to the end, but who also exhibits a cunning sadism in how he does his business, including blowing up the homes and businesses of local merchants who refuse to play ball with him, chastising his own henchmen when they fuck up an assignment by mercilessly beating on the one hired thug who looks like he’d be better off as an accountant, and even resorting to acts of murder in order to get his way and send a proper message to Dalton, all while advocating with a straight face about how he does what he does for the good of the town and even bragging at one point about how he has gotten JCPenney(!) to open up a store there. He also has his top henchman (Marshall Teague) who is such an imposing badass that Dalton knows upon first sight that he is crossing paths with a “fellow samurai” so to speak, leading to their own big showdown which remains one of the best fight scenes in cinema history, and with one of the most ludicrous bad guy lines to boot. Dalton rekindles a friendship with the blind guitar player / lead singer of the bar’s house band (Jeff Healey), ignites a romance with a beautiful blond doctor (Kelly Lynch) who happens to be Wesley’s target of obsession as well, and finally is forced to bring in his old friend and mentor Wade Garrett (Sam Elliot) when things get a little too hairy for his liking, as Elliot continues to demonstrate that despite his grizzled old biker / cowboy with a heart of gold persona, he also has that good old fashioned movie star charisma on top of that. Obviously the testosterone levels here run pretty deep, but the masculine nature of the whole enterprise takes things to a warped new level, with dialogue and scenarios that get so crazy any level of realism goes out the window and we are invited to partake in the insanity and chaos that ensues, with bar fights breaking out onscreen every 10 to 15 minutes, including a number of all out ones, excessive amounts of female nudity along with one bit where Swayze casually walks naked in front of a non romantic love interest waitress (Kathleen Wilhoite) with an obvious crush on him, and dialogue and one liners so macho that you can feel your balls drop when you hear them. Other bits include Keith David coming in to play an apparent bartender friend of Dalton’s who replaced the skimmer, but instead had all of his scenes cut out of the movie for time constraints (including those explaining who he is and where he came from), leaving this very popular actor with only one line of dialogue, plus the presence of former Elvis Presley bodyguard Red West playing one of the small business owners terrorized by Wesley, and the ridiculous notion that Dalton is an intellectual with a degree in philosophy that is so sloppily played off by Swayze’s acting that it makes one feel like even he doesn’t seem to believe it. Meanwhile, bodies get beaten, heads get cracked, and bones get broken as the crazed, violent nature of the film manages to permeate one’s own subconsciousness and allows the viewer to never get bored and stay entertained at all of the mayhem at all times. Sometimes a so called “good bad movie” is just what the doctor called for in order to lift the blues from within ourselves, and this might just be the greatest ever of that kind in that respect, a film that proudly wears its absurdities on its sleeve as a badge of honor, and never apologizes for upholding the ideals of so called “movies for guys”, so much so that it’s still unbelievable that it even got made in the first place…
10/10