|
Road House (19-May-1989)
Director: Rowdy Herrington Writers: Hilary Henkin; David Lee Henry Keywords: Action/Adventure, Martial Arts
REVIEWS Review by anonymous (posted on 10-May-2006) If you are a young blue collar
american male, then "Road House" is your "Ben Hur." It tells the story
of an expert "cooler" (a security manager at a bar) named Dalton who is
paid by a nightclub owner in a small Southern town to help him clean up
his roadhouse bar, named the Double Deuce. People who are hypercritical
of action films will say that the premise is dumb and the characters
are rednecks. This movie is not "Being John Malcovich" or "Fight Club"
and does not presume to be. It won't make you think very hard and there
aren't any strange plot twists. But this film is entertaining and has
strong points. For one, Dalton (played by "Dirty Dancer" Patrick
Swayze) comes from a mysterious background. The film makers don't try to
build him him up as an ex-special forces commando or rogue ex-cop. He
is shown exercising one morning by doing Yang style Tai Chi in a horse
pasture and one of the other bouncers at the Double Deuce reveals that
Dalton once killed a man by ripping his throat out. In one climatic
scene, Dalton demonstrates this technique, a Kung Fu "eagle claw" where
the fingers of his right hand hook into the soft tissues around a man's
trachea which is torn sideways, killing him. Still, Dalton isn't
superhuman. He's fast but gets punched and cut and, occasionally, even
shot. And he isn't inhumanly strong and has to hit people repeatedly to
put them down. Sam Elliot plays his friend Wade, an old burned out
bouncer who taught Dalton the ins and outs of the profession. Jeff
Healey is on-hand playing a terrible bar musician (what a stretch).
There are several entertaining fights where local tough guys employed
by a the town bully, a crime lord played by Ben Gazzara,pit their drug
and alcohol induced fury against Daltons skill and physical dicipline.
Swayze has several stupid and annoying lines in the film, like bragging
"pain don't hurt", but it adds to the charm. You can see that once the
trouble with the local bad guys starts escalating beyond the confines
of the bar, Dalton seems out of his element: he's a bouncer not a hero.
Kelly Lynch plays Dalton's boring pacifist girlfriend, a local doctor
who doesn't believe in killing even in self-defense. For all Dalton's
neo-buddhist, existential nonsense, this is still a movie about a
bouncer beating the crap out of people. And on those merits, it is
entertaining. It definately must be watched at least once in a man's
lifetime and discussed with other men. Most women I know despise this
movie. This movie was not made for them. Enjoy.
Locate a copy of this film here.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2009 Soylent Communications
|
