Road House Review

Jake Gyllenhaal is the whole argument for this one. He plays Dalton, a washed out fighter hired to clean up a bar in the Florida Keys, with a hollow eyed politeness that curdles fast, and the running bit where he asks the men he is about to hit whether they have insurance and offers to drive them to the hospital is the only writing here with any personality.

The fighting is where it falls apart. Doug Liman shoots the punches with a digitally stitched camera that flies into a face and out the far side, and the composited impacts have the weightless look of a video game replay, so a film sold on bare knuckle brutality ends up with almost no physical consequence in it. Conor McGregor turns up as Knox doing something nearer to a wrestling entrance than a performance, arms wide, shirtless, grinning at nothing, and the scenes around him stop dead. Billy Magnussen plays the resort developer as a spoiled boy with no menace behind him, Daniela Melchior's doctor exists mostly to be threatened, and the last act sets a boat and a bookshop on fire without ever establishing why anyone would fight this hard over one roadhouse.