Review of Road House (1989) by Campbell P — 13 Sep 2015

Road House is one of those films where you just question your overall mood and attitude at the given moment. It may be one of the dumber movies in Hollywood but let's be real here, I can name a TON of movies that are worse than this.

This film is a lot of fun and that's why you go to see a movie, to be entertained. The plot follows the events of the legendary bar bouncer, Dalton who gives up his job at a Memphis bar to work at a different bar in Missouri.

There he faces the challenges of reestablishing the trashy bar and saving it from the clutches of his power hungry neighbors. Anyone with or without a brain can go into Road House and understand the plot because it's so simple with no complexity in sight.

While this can be considered a good thing since it will appeal to a bigger audience, it's a bad thing in any other way because it's really distracting how it tries to be clever but fails a lot.

For instance, they try to make the characters all play a big part in the movie and I couldn't even recall 3/4s of the people's names at the very end. There's no character arc in any way, shape, or form except when Dalton decides not to rip someone's throat out.

The real problem I want to address is his Dalton is too perfect. They make this guy too likable and respectful and that's really not interesting because he doesn't need to learn anything from what he's doing.

In movies, we enjoy seeing a flawed person achieve something to recognize their value, but here there's nowhere to go because he's already perfect and that angered me. The action is fun to watch for a majority of the film, but at some parts it's painfully obvious that something or someone could be attached to a wire or throw something out of their hands that was meant to be kicked.

None of the characters are really vulnerable either, given that Swayze never says "ow" or shows expression on his face that he's in pain. A perfect example is that a guy gets shot multiple times and after each gunfire he would stand up until the last.

The positives to this film is that it's really entertaining in a mindless way and I never felt the need to check the time really, so it's a good time killer and a fun way to spend 2 hours. The character of Dalton and some of his action scenes were fun to watch and that was a lot of fun as well but I was just distracted by other flaws while watching.

Road House is just mindless, violent fun that has a well made scene at one point and a painfully bad scene at another due to poor written dialogue and acting. C.