Pain still don’t hurt. Even in sequels!
It was a risky move, remaking Road House, a film so singularly focused on its quirky ’80s vibe and the charisma of its star, the late Patrick Swayze. But this year’s update, which starred Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role of bouncer supreme Elwood Dalton, proved popular with streaming audiences on Amazon’s Prime Video — popular enough, in fact, that Amazon is now going to make a sequel.
The streaming service announced the news at their upfronts today, tweeting on their official account that “Jake Gyllenhaal is set to reprise his role” in a Road House sequel. Their tweet also touted the fact that the film had supposedly been seen by “80 million viewers to date.”
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As far as I’m concerned this is welcome news; I thought the new Road House was surprisingly good. Before watching it, I would have said you had to be a fool to think you could remake Road House. Apparently you can! As I wrote in my review…
Road House became a cult classic because it was fun to watch on cable. None of it was hard to understand — or at least none of it made any less sense — if you flipped to it halfway through. No matter where you started or stopped watching it, you were guaranteed to see some thrills, some violence, some sex appeal, and probably a couple laughs, intentional or otherwise. While the cable TV movie ecosystem seems to be going extinct, the new Road House would have thrived in it as well. This is the kind of consistently entertaining movie you could happily watch 100 times without ever actively intending to watch it twice. By its conclusion, it accumulates the atmosphere of a great bar; a place you go less to get drunk than to soak in the vibes of the music and the regulars. It is so much better than it has any right to be.
No word yet on when the Road House sequel will premiere, or who else will be involved, either in front of or behind the camera. This year’s remake was directed by Doug Liman.
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