Road House (1989)

Film: Road House (1989)

Stars: Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, Kevin Tighe

Director: Rowdy Herrington

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Sam Elliott: click here to learn more about Mr. Elliott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As you may have gathered over the past two weeks, Sam Elliott would never be Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.  In a Hollywood increasingly uninterested in movie westerns, Elliott didn't really have a place as a leading man, and though he was uniquely handsome and tall, in the 1980's against "prettier" leading men like Richard Gere & Mel Gibson, he didn't fit the times.  He had a lot of success doing B-Grade western miniseries (which were hot at the time), but in terms of the movies this meant that for much of the decade, Elliott transitioned into the role of in-demand character actor, and ended up a few rungs down the call sheet to a number of big names, including Cher (Mask) and Whoopi Goldberg (Fatal Beauty).  He even played second banana to one of those leading man/pretty boys in today's film, Road House, where Elliott portrays a bouncer-mentor to a high-kicking Patrick Swayze.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film stars Swayze as James Dalton, a professional "cooler," a term for a bouncer who runs security at a club and makes sure that its clients don't fight & stay safe.  He's hired by a restaurant owner Frank Tilman (Tighe, who is so entrenched in my memory for his villainous role on Lost I kept expecting him to be a secret bad guy) to come to a town in Missouri to solve the problems of his restaurant, but there's a problem.  The town is run by local crime boss Brad Wesley (Gazzara), who doesn't like Dalton, and is intent on running him out of town if he won't work for him.  Meanwhile, Dalton falls in love with a blonde doctor Elizabeth Clay (Reilly), who doesn't know what Wesley knows-that Dalton has a past, including where he ripped out a man's throat, supposedly in self-defense, but the audience understands Dalton has some rage issues.  When his mentor Wade (Elliott) comes to town & they fight Wesley's men, it becomes a standoff between the two, with Wesley running his monster truck through a local car dealership, setting a man's house on fire, and killing Wade just to "teach Dalton a lesson."  The film ends with the townspeople killing Wesley as he attempts to murder Dalton, finally standing up for themselves.  And after the murder, they all go back to the bar to celebrate.

To say Road House is stupid is to really undersell what this film will do to your brain cells.  If you're a Millennial, you probably know this movie less from Swayze's original film (which was a modest hit in 1989 and had a long shelf life on VHS), and more so from it being mocked on Family Guy, where Peter takes on the role of Dalton & starts roundhouse kicking everyone to get his way.  This...is exactly the plot of Road House (and much funnier than anything in the actual movie).  The film makes no sense.  In real life, someone as villainous as Wesley, especially in 1989, would be arrested by the FBI, certainly after running a monster truck through a car dealership with dozens of eye witnesses in broad daylight (by far the stupidest scene in the movie).  Not to mention, it's not clear why Dalton literally lets Wade get murdered for no reason, not warning he or Elizabeth that Wesley threatened their lives.  The plot to this movie looks like you took a battering ram through the script, it makes so little sense.

That said, while it's the dumbest movie I've seen in a long time, it's not the worst.  Swayze is gorgeous (as is Reilly), but their acting is so bad I found myself cackling at the over-seriousness of it.  The only person that's having much fun onscreen is Elliott, who plays his horny, whiskey-grizzled mentor role with a lot of humor.  At one point he unzips his pants to show a scar to Reilly's character (and in the process, exposes his pubic hair), and the film plays it as such a rizz-induced joke that it kind of works.  He's not in enough of the film to make it properly enjoyable, but he saves it from being bargain-basement action garbage.