More damaging than underwritten character dynamics is the overall tone of “Road House,” which needed to be far more tactile to be effective. This is a movie in which you need to feel the heat of the Florida Keys, the impact of a punch, the thud of a body hitting the floor. Oh, the over-crafted noises are there, but it’s all so obviously created in a CGI lab. It’s weird because the fight scenes that are quick—like the first one with the bikers, when Dalton disarms a man by making him unable to shoot, have an immediacy that works. But whenever “Road House” has to go “extended fight sequence,” you can see ALL the strings. Punches and their reactions look like cut scenes in a video game far too often, especially a long bar brawl and a boat sequence in the end that have CGI so janky that I wonder if the reason that Prime didn’t want this on a big screen was because people would be less likely to notice on a small screen.
And then there’s Conor McGregor as Knox, a sociopath who launches like he was shot out of a cannon into the back half of the movie to finish the job with Dalton. Knox brings a spark to a movie that’s getting dry, but McGregor’s performance is equally fascinating and baffling, delivered almost entirely through a massive grin like he’s doing a bit at a weigh-in before a match. He struts and smiles like an aggro Popeye, and it feels like Liman told him to go over the top and so McGregor shot to the moon. There are times when his awkward line readings sound abjectly wrong, but maybe that’s intentional? It’s a constant push-and-pull of whether or not McGregor is purposefully awkward because Knox is a sociopath or if the fighter just doesn’t yet know how to put words together on screen. Debate amongst yourselves.
As silly as it sounds, that push-and-pull between realism and cartoonish insanity that rests in McGregor’s performance is indicative of the quality of the movie overall. Gyllenhaal is making one movie—a story of an almost-Zen fighter pushed past his breaking point—while people like Magnusson and McGregor lean into the ridiculousness in the other half. The two never come together. Of course, there are a lot of ‘80s movies with grounded heroes and exaggerated villains, but this new “Road House” makes one appreciate the balance of those more. And the lack of CGI.
This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. It premieres on Prime Video on March 21.
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