Road House’s screenplay begins with this statement of purpose:
Dalton has a degree in psychology from NYU.
He drives a new Mercedes.
His entire worldly goods fit easily into the trunk.
He carries his X-rays and medical records with him.
He keeps in superb condition a body that has been shot
and stabbed and had more than 30 bones broken and has
been screwed back together by an impressive array of
stainless steel screws.
He has already worked in almost half the states in the Union.
He makes a lot of money.
He is the best there is at what he does.
He is a bouncer.
When Road House sticks to this ethos, it is immaculate. The 1989 country-fried action movie treats bouncers like ronin, the samurai who wandered feudal Japan in search of a master. They are known throughout the land — friends to downtrodden service workers and enemies to greedy tycoons. If the cinematic mythos of the cowboy evolved from the Japanese samurai, so too did the musclebound good ol’boys of Rowdy Herrington’s Road House.
At its best, Road House is Yojimbo crossed with Eastbound and Down. At its worst, it’s a pretty bad 80s movie.
Taking an immediate page out of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Road House begins with dough-faced bar owner Frank Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) seeking out a powerful enough “cooler” to tame the hordes of wild men who terrorize his Missouri dive bar, the Double Deuce. In his quest, he ventures to the streets of NYC, where the legendary James Dalton (Patrick Swayze) runs security for an immense yuppie-friendly rock club. Lured by the need for a challenge, Dalton quits that night and drives his Mercedes down to Missouri. Here, Dalton assumes command of the dopey bar staff — turning them into an army of polo-wearing bouncers — and runs afoul of local evil billionaire, Brad Wesely (Ben Gazzara).1
It's in this opening hour that Road House grabs and rips the throat out of its full potential. Dalton’s arrival at the Double Deuce is fantastic table setting — draped in a suede jacket, he sips a bar coffee and observes the chaos around him, making notes of employees to fire and those who show bravery in the face of battle. With near-constant fights, flagrant drug use, and beer bottles being chucked at the band, the Double Deuce feels like a Pantera audience was offloaded into the Mos Eisley Cantina. It’s in this rat’s nest that Dalton’s near mythological status is established, as the lowly bar staff somehow recognize Dalton and treat him with a wary reverence. In this world without videos of barfights being spread on Barstool Sports or LADbible, the names of legendary bouncers somehow travel down through the roots of America from bar to bar.
If anyone is worthy of that Americana mythos, it’s Dalton. He embodies a warrior calmness: easily dispatching troublemakers from his bar with a knee-shattering kick or a piledriver to the floor, while laughing off the nightly ritual of those same troublemakers cutting his tires or shattering his windshield. His oldtimer landlord watches him practice shirtless Tai chi in the afternoon sun,2 and he spends his nights off reading Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall (also shirtless). Yet, there is an anger bubbling up inside his glistening chest. Townsfolk whisper rumors that he once ripped out another man’s throat with his bare hands.3 And when Dalton brings in another veteran bouncer, Wade (Sam Elliott),4 for backup, he acts as a violence enabler. “When a man sticks a gun in yer face,” Wade says, “you got two choices; you can die or you can KILL THE MOTHERFUCKER.”
The violence in Road House is an anachronistic spectacle. Frankly, it’s awesome to watch dudes in button-downs and blue jeans kick each other to death as if they were in a Stephen Chow movie. The villainous Brad Wesely dispatches an army of goons who look like demented little league coaches to rain hell on the small town, all in an effort to drag out the monster in Dalton. Wesley even has his own nega-Dalton (Marshall R. Teague) — a scummy martial artist who utters the famous line “I used to fuck guys like you in prison” during his and Dalton’s final fight. However, this focus on Dalton’s internal battle between violence and control becomes Road House’s own fracture point. This is best personified by Doc (Kelly Lynch), the doctor who stitches up Dalton’s numerous wounds and acts as his love interest. She urges him to give up on bouncing and is disgusted by Dalton’s violent tendencies. It’s understandable that a doctor wouldn’t be thrilled by someone breaking people’s arms each night. But Doc consistently acts counter to what the audience wants. It’s unfair that this is levied on the only substantial female character, but when we came to Road House to watch urban samurai eviscerate each other, the long middle stretches of Dalton and Doc sharing sterile, anti-chemistry feels like someone pulling the E-brake at 90 mph.
When we first enter the Double Deuce, it’s dirty as hell. Peanut shells litter the ground. Every kind of liquid coats the knife-scratched surfaces. Guys in perms brawl for the right to ogle women with the largest hair in Missouri. By the last act, Dalton has transformed the dive into a grey, chain bar. One in which upper-middle-class couples can drink long island iced teas and dance carefree and clean. It’s hilarious to watch Dalton marvel over such a lame space — a bar seemingly made in Excel — but it’s a bit sad too. It’s a boring place, filled with meandering conversation and the worst the 80s have to offer.
The old Double Deuce was fast and dangerous, but goddamn, at least it had some character.
Road House is streaming on Netflix.
Special thanks to Sophie and Tyler Herr, Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
I love Ben Gazzara (who we covered before in The Big Lebowski), but even Road House should know that the audience isn’t dumb enough to think a one-on-one fight between him and Swayze would be dramatic.
As friend and guest-writer Ian Erickson said in his review on Letterboxd, Road House “employs the storytelling device ‘Chekhov's Throatrip.’"
Mustache-free, long grey hair, the youngest he’s ever looked – Sam Elliott is a five-alarm babe in this movie.