In the ‘Road House’ Remake, Jake Gyllenhaal Is Still Desperate to Play the Tough Guy

If you were casting about for a male star who best fits a template set by the late Patrick Swayze – physically graceful, generously coiffed, yet also muscular enough to drop-kick assailants out of a bar – you might not immediately land on Jake Gyllenhaal, Swayze’s one-time co-star in the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko. It’s not that present-day Gyllenhaal lacks any of those characteristics (well, OK, the hair, but who among us, etc.); he’s no longer the scrawny-looking sensitive kid from Darko, and has convincingly played cops, soldiers, and various brawlers as an adult, with some light musical theater experience to boot. It’s more that Gyllenhaal’s persona, initially on the gently nerdy side in his more youthful roles, has given way to a kind of neurotic intensity that wasn’t Swayze’s forte.

Just look at Swayze in Donnie Darko, where he briefly plays an unctuous motivational speaker, oiling up his natural charisma and obscuring human feeling with sloganeering as Gyllenhaal’s Donnie confronts him. When Gyllenhaal has played similarly heightened or satirically-minded parts in movies like Okja or Nightcrawler, he takes a different tactic, making his (and his characters’) efforts more visible, even when they’re filled with terrifying confidence. Swayze is naturally slick, whereas you can see Gyllenhaal producing the necessary perspiration. That’s part of what makes his live-wire work in Okja and Nightcrawler so grabby; it’s also worlds away from Swayze’s style.

That easy-does-it masculinity is presumably part of Swayze’s appeal in the 1989 action picture Road House; he may be frequently shirtless (and occasionally fully nude), often shining with sweat and/or blood, but he’s essentially playing a then-modern Zen cowboy – a laconic man of few words who emancipates a harassed one-bar town with his righteous balletic fury. The new remake of Road House swaps Gyllenhaal into Swayze’s role of Dalton, a best-in-the-biz bouncer hired to clean up a rowdy roadside bar in a town controlled by a nefarious businessman, and it’s a lot less simple than a movie-star flex. Or rather, the performance flexes two decidedly different muscles at once: his early-career sensitivity and his later-career penchant for self-torture.

The new Road House is most enjoyable when Gyllenhaal plays a sort of before-and-after image of himself in quick, repeated succession, flipping from mild to wild to mild again. In one early scene, he mimics a moment from the original movie by reacting nonchalantly to getting stabbed during a fight, performing the necessary surgical mending himself. A little while later, he introduces himself to the patrons at his new job by taking their fight outside – and before the fisticuffs begin, he politely attempts to give the henchmen an out and then, failing that, asks them about the location of the nearest hospital, so everyone is prepared for the inevitable. Then, in true aw-shucks Jack Reacher style, he kicks the shit out of them, albeit carefully and concisely enough to not cause any damage that looks permanent. The extra punchline is even better: The movie cuts to the henchmen in Dalton’s car, as he drives them to the hospital in question, 25 minutes down the road. (One of them in particular becomes likably deferential to him for the rest of the movie, an inspired running gag.)

The reluctant warrior – the tough guy who can take on all comers, while insisting that he’d prefer to avoid such violence – has been an action-movie standby for basically as long as action movies have existed, yet Gyllenhaal gives his version of Dalton a particularly charming spin. He plays the world’s greatest bouncer less as a conflicted monk and more as a guy mildly amused (though not shocked) by his own physical resilience – and quietly, even sweetly exasperated that more people can’t just take him at his word about it. He’s uncommonly convincing as a man of peace who happens to be a pro-level ass-kicker.

At least at first, anyway. This being a Jake Gyllenhaal-led thriller of recent vintage, the understated charm cannot stand. The tortured fury must emerge, and Gyllenhaal must endure a gauntlet of beatings, stabbings, and fury-inducing incitements to murder. The movie also reveals a guilt-soaked backstory that remains mystifyingly vague compared to the original, even as it tries to up the ante. Rather than killing a man in self-defense like Swayze’s Dalton, Gyllenhaal’s version is a former MMA fighter who accidentally killed an opponent in the ring – and what’s more, they were friends, though the movie never explains anything more about why Dalton went so nuts on his former pal. Maybe that was cut out for narrative expediency; regardless, it makes Road House seem so intent on goading Dalton on that it can’t focus. For the final stretch of the movie, there are no fewer than four different bad guys, working sort of together yet largely out of sync (and one entirely off-camera), threatening four different allies of Dalton: the owner of the bar and his boss (Jessica Williams), his tough-gal love interest (Daniela Melchior), and a father-daughter team who run a book store down the road from the bar. Gyllenhaal matches well with all of these characters, whether flirting, aiding, or threatening. Put together, though, they have the same single-minded purpose as his sketchy backstory: Get Dalton to go off. They’re not people; they’re motivations for violence.

And of course, that’s why audiences tune in to these types of movies and shows; no one watches westerns to actually see ranchers tending their cattle, no one watches or reads or a Jack Reacher story to see Reacher’s scenic, uneventful bus trip to a new city, and no one watches Road House in any year for a peaceful night of honky-tonk enjoyed by all (R.I.P. Jeff Healey). But Gyllenaal’s early-movie charm also has the effect of recalling some of his best and least strenuous performances, while the second half’s relentless prodding fits in with movies like The Covenant, Ambulance, Southpaw, or The Guilty. On these endless proving grounds, it feels like putting Gyllenhaal through some kind of physical and/or mental wringer is their whole point: Watch sensitive Jake bulk up, lash out, and howl with pain, even when, as in Road House, the violence itself is cartoony to the point of looking effects-augmented.

Gyllenhaal is often good in these types of movies, but all the commitment in the world can’t will something like Southpaw into a serious exploration of grief, violence, and guilt. At least Road House more or less admits that it’s using Gyllenhaal’s intensity in service of entertainment, not soul-searching, with a sense of humor about its silliness that never resorts to winking condescension at the original film. Still, the sight of a sweaty, bloody, and battered Gyllenhaal brings to mind other stars who have taken a swerve into endurance tests. Is he becoming a less hotheaded, more secular version of Mark Wahlberg, who can be heard explaining that “suffering is a skill” even in his current family-friendly heartwarmer about a brave dog? Wahlberg seems committed to the Mel Gibson school of cinematic Catholicism, where sins are punished and endured as if by a crankier Jesus who can’t quite turn the other cheek. Gyllenhaal isn’t that far gone, yet his movies do seem increasingly focused on a Biblical brand of punishment, veering further from, say, Tom Cruise, the master of submitting himself to the rigorous demands of big-budget action filmmaking.

Gyllenhaal’s sweet-and-gritty blend makes this Road House both more outwardly charming than the original, and more self-conscious. The 1989 movie flirts with sociopathy in that classic 1980s way – for my money, it’s Swayze, not his once-derided Point Break star Keanu Reeves, who truly embodies the line between minimalist action-bro enlightenment and a genuine void. That also gives the original, and Swayze’s whole deal, a kind of movie-star serenity, even (or especially) in its vacuousness. Gyllenhaal still fights like he’s got something to prove. That’s not necessarily a bad thing on its own, but after this many assertions that he is truly a tough, tortured man, it becomes a strange spectacle, seeing this talented actor so willing and eager to bleed for junk.

Road House arrives on Prime Video on Thursday, March 21.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.