Ross McD and Ross McG must have been living under two separate rocks the past few months, because they’ve only just found out that 80s classic Road House is getting a remake.
One Ross thinks it’s a great idea, the other… not so much.
It’s time to get loaded in the Double Deuce and start fighting…
Ross McG: FOR
“You’re too stupid to have a good time.”
Back in the late ’80s, there was one VHS every 10-year-old kid wanted to get their grubby hands on. It had two magical words in its title, and under them were two more magical words: “Patrick” and “Swayze”.
And that film was… Dirty Dancing.
Don’t be fooled by the wave of nostalgia that has washed over movie culture the past 20 years ago proclaiming DD as the ultimate “chick flick”.
In the few years after Dirty Dancing was released in 1987 when it was finally available to rent on video, boys were gagging to see it just as much as girls.
On VHS, Dirty Dancing was rated 15, which back in the late 80s promised three things: boobs, blood and bad words. Even the title sounded grimy. It became a myth.
Anyone who claimed to have seen Dirty Dancing was cornered in the school playground at break-time. “Is it really dirty?” we’d ask. “Is the dancing any good?”
Now, it seems laughable that the movie was some kind of prepubescent forbidden fruit. On the film’s IMDb Parents Guide page, under the “violence and gore” section, one of the warnings reads: “Two men fight”.
Hmmm… now what if there was a Swayze movie where that was the ENTIRE plot?
While they stupidly wouldn’t admit to loving the wonderful Dirty Dancing, teenage boys – and, as Swayze’s legendary bouncer James Dalton calls them, “40-year-old adolescents” – worshipped Road House.
This is a movie that, incredibly, lives up to its endless set of legendary taglines. Exhibit A? “The dancing’s over. Now it gets dirty.”
This is a movie where Dalton rips out a man’s throat with his bare hands. This is a film where Sam Elliott plays Sam Elliott. This is a film featuring the music of the late great blind guitarist Jeff Healey. This is a film in which Jackie Treehorn himself, Ben Gazzara, one of American cinema’s most esteemed actors, plays one of its downright meanest villains. This is a film directed, appropriately enough, by a man named Rowdy. This is a film in which Swayze utters the immortal line, “Pain don’t hurt”.
They just don’t make ’em like this any more. Except… now they do. Road House is getting a redo. And I for one am delighted.
They really should remake Road House every 10 years, not every 35. Every generation needs its Road House.
The remake is being directed by Doug Liman, famous for Swingers, the first Bourne movie, that one where Tom Cruise dies every day and that other Tom Cruise one where he smuggles cocaine. In other words, it’s in safe hands.
And who is going to replace Swayze? Come on, you can’t replace Swayze.
But there’s only one man for the job of trying to match him.
It’s his Donnie Darko co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal, of course!
In his heyday, Swayze went from Dirty Dancing to Road House to Ghost to Point Break to To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. He’s remembered as an action tough guy, but if you look up “versatile” in the dictionary, you’ll find the definition of the word “versatile”, which is what he was.
Gyllenhaal is cut from the same cloth. I can’t think of a top-line male actor with a more varied – and mostly successful – output in recent years.
Zodiac, Prisoners, Nightcrawler, Nocturnal Animals… these are films with Gyllenhaal performances that will be talked about for decades.
But to slide into Swayze’s bouncing boots, you have to have action chops, and the signs are that Gyllenhaal will follow up his unhinged performance in Michael Bay’s Ambulance with something equally entertaining in Road House 2.0.
Recent set photos and footage, in which Gyllenhaal crashed an actual UFC weigh-in (his character is a former fighter turned bouncer), show that he is ripped and ready.
Gyllenhaal plays someone called Elwood Dalton, who could be the original Dalton’s son, nephew or just some other guy called Dalton, who cares? This isn’t Star Wars – everyone doesn’t have to be related to everyone else.
This is Bar Wars. And it’s about to get brutal, bloody and, who knows, maybe even booby. All over again.
Ross McD: AGAINST
“Never start anything inside unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Let me start by saying I’m not against reboots or remakes at all. Yes, they are easy to shit on as lazy and pointless, but sometimes, there is a fair enough reason.
Sometimes the OG is in a foreign language, and an English redo might open it up to a larger audience who balk at subtitles (think The Ring, or Oldboy).
Sometimes, they try something fun like a gender switch (Overboard) or a live action version of an animated film (take your pick from Disney).
Sometimes it’s a classic horror looking for younger audiences who didn’t grow up with it (A Nightmare On Elm Street, Psycho, Carrie, The Thing).
And sometimes, it’s a casting choice that’s worth the try (David Harbour as Hellboy? Sure! Nic Cage in The Wicker Man? Absolutely!)
Allow me to also clarify, that each and every one of these remakes and reboots were totally shit. Or at very best, paled to transparency in comparison to the original.
I didn’t say I liked reboots. But I am not against them trying.
But there is a category of movie that should not, under any circumstances, be remade or rebooted.
And that is Patrick Swayze movies.
Patrick Swayze movies are perfect. They don’t need anything. The only thing they should be “re”-ed, is re-released. As they are.
Did NOBODY see the desecration that was the second Point Break? Did NO ONE ELSE sit through that blasphemous second attempt at Dirty Dancing?
Who DA FUK can — with one sad-eyed look — say “I don’t wanna fight you but I will totally remove your throat with my bare hands if I have to”?
James Dalton literally invented the Mortal Kombat fatality. You don’t f**k with him, and you don’t f**k with his film.
It’s a real shame… Ross McG and I were only just discussing how Jake Gyllenhaal had yet to make a bad film, putting him in a rare category with Leo DiCaprio, and no one else.
You would think Swayze’s Donnie Darko castmate would have a little more respect. I guess not.
I love Gyllenhaal. I like the idea of the modern UFC setting. As an Irishman, I am even obligated to like Conor McGregor. He is undoubtedly the greatest fight salesman of all time. But can he sell this film? I highly doubt it.
If you’re willing to so shamelessly cast someone just for clout… well, you deserve the box office ground and pound you are bound to receive.
Seriously, stop disrespecting the Swayz with this shit.
If you’re not careful, they’re gonna remake Ghost with Channing fecking Tatum or something…
WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU WANT A ROAD HOUSE REMAKE?
Ross v Ross 
I need to talk about the 1990 Gene Hackman film Narrow Margin
Posted in COMMENT with tags Film, Gene Hackman, Movies on August 29, 2023 by Ross McGAnyone turned on the TV lately?
It’s bloody awful out there, isn’t it? Critics who drone on about how we live in the golden age of television clearly haven’t switched one on in the last ten years or so.
I’m not talking about the endless options on streaming – which, lately, is its own problem – but the daily shovelling of crud you are fed if you are unlucky or, like me, stupid enough to try to find something to watch on terrestrial telly.
I was in Ireland earlier this month, where, secret payment scandals aside, viewers are lucky enough to have good old RTE. For those of you reading this in the UK, RTE is like BBC, only useful, and not totally beholden to the endless ream of sewing, repairing and masterchefing shite that is served up nightly.
This is because RTE has discovered that there are these things called… ‘films’. And that people might want to watch them during primetime hours in the middle of the week. And don’t get me started on Film4… showing Taken 3 once every fortnight does not make you a movie channel.
Either RTE1 or RTE2 had a film on every night when I was there, so I lapped up In The Name Of The Father for the first time in years (still brilliant, especially that moment when the late great Sinead O’Connor’s track kicks in), Official Secrets (am I the only one who loves Keira Knightley? Go watch The Duchess or Never Let Me Go if you still need convincing) and a wonderful little Irish movie called Herself, about a woman who builds a house in her elderly friend’s back garden (it sounds terrible but it’s actually great).
While Irish TV is a haven for movie lovers who like to stumble on to their film fare rather than scroll through Netflix for longer than it takes to watch what they eventually choose, in the UK it’s slim pickings on the old Freeview.
But then, out of the blue, on an August bank holiday Monday night, strides Gene fecking Hackman, on a little channel up in the number 30s or 40s called Legend. Now, I dunno what the hell Legend is, but I know I will be coming back to it.
That’s because it was showing a Gene Hackman movie at the blissfully ordinary time of 9pm.
The film in question was Narrow Margin, a 1990 thriller in which Hackman plays an assistant district attorney forced to chaperone a witness to a mob murder to safety on board a train hurtling through Canada. It’s like Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, but, you know, a real film.
As a bonus, it was also a Hackman film I had never heard of. That may be something to do with its lousy box office and middling, but fairly accurate, 6.6/10 rating on IMDb.
But who cares?! It has everyone in it – there’s Anne Archer, perhaps unfairly best known as the wife in Fatal Attraction and Patriot Games; there’s Harris Yulin, whose role here is a neat precursor to his memorable turn in the Frasier episode, A Word To The Wiseguy; there’s the late JT Walsh, the original ‘Hey! It’s that guy!’, who played memorable slimeballs in everything from Red Rock West (man, I need to watch Red Rock West again) to Breakdown and The Negotiator; and there’s M Emmet Walsh, who is simply in every great film ever made.
Narrow Margin is also the only film that has both JT Walsh and M Emmet Walsh, so, I mean, come on.
I won’t give away any of the plot – not that there’s much of one – but there is some brilliant in-camera action that still holds up three decades later.
Technically a remake of the 1952 movie The Narrow Margin, which writer/cinematographer/director Peter Hyams caught on TV late one night (wonder if he was watching RTE?), the 1990 version has some fighting stunt work that I genuinely preferred over the much-lauded, but, in my opinion, strangely flat, top-of-train sequence we got recently in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
On a side note, I did want to write here about the sadly disappointing time I had with Mission: Impossible 7, but I have a feeling I may be kinder to it on a repeat viewing.
I had known Hyams mainly as the director of the one good Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Timecop, and the very underrated Arnie v Gabriel Byrne’s devil flick, End Of Days, and Narrow Margin showcases his great flair for action.
And yet the film’s more quiet moments are the most memorable, as in almost all of the interaction between Hackman’s surly deputy DA and Archer’s tough publishing editor, as they inexplicably avoid the cardboard cutout bad guys while on the train, and in the wonderful opening blind date scene between Archer and JT Walsh, which pulls you right into the movie from the off.
It’s Hackman’s film, however, and he obviously enjoyed playing a lawyer, as he stayed in court for 1991’s Class Action (damn, when is that going to be on TV?) and 1993’s Cruise missile The Firm.
Narrow Margin definitely belongs up there in the pantheon of two-worded Gene Hackman films whose titles mean almost less than nothing, along with Under Fire, Uncommon Valor, Split Decisions, Extreme Measures, Absolute Power and Under Suspicion.
So if you are lucky enough to have Legend on your telly box, keep an eye on the TV timetable for when this train pulls back into the station.
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