Roadhouse (2024) Review: A House With No Foundation

The Roadhouse 2024 remake from Amazon Prime Video lacks in a lot of areas and is overall just an average action flick.

Amazon Prime is releasing films of its own, like Roadhouse (2024), without a theatrical run at all. This isn’t the first time they’ve done it, but they will start doing it more frequently. It seems they are doing this to compete with the likes of Netflix, Max, and Hulu. It seems this is the norm now that we will get high-budget films not in theaters but only on one streaming service. Sometimes we see streaming-only movies get a physical release eventually, but that’s about it.

Roadhouse (2024) is a remake of the 1989 classic action flick starring Patrick Swayze. And in Roadhouse (2024), we are seeing Jake Gyllenhaal in the leading role of Dalton and Connor McGregor playing the villain role of Knox. This is Connor McGregor’s big acting debut. While he had a voice-acting role in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and voiced himself in the UFC games, it seems that’s it. But I don’t think he will go on to be a big athlete turned actor like the Rock was. His performance was not that great, even though it was pretty entertaining, but not for the right reasons. It was more silly and over-the-top. 

To get into it, Roadhouse (2024) itself suffers from a pretty poorly written screenplay. While there is some definite acting talent in this film, the lines the actors are given are cringe-worthy. They are also completely unnatural for people to say in the real world, so it comes off as pretty phony in the movie. Sometimes I could’ve predicted what the next wine would be, and I was usually right. Also, the romance scenes fell pretty flat with the dialogue they were given. Which was pretty rough, as that was what I was looking forward to most, as that would’ve helped humanize our main characters in Roadhouse (2024).

Jake Gyllenhaal is one of my favorite actors, and I think he is one of the best actors working in Hollywood right now, for sure. He has so many great roles and so many great films. It seems that could have been one of his biggest roles of late. It was not necessarily his fault with this one, but it was one of his weaker performances. He didn’t have a chance to show any of his acting chops as well in Roadhouse (2024).

It seemed that a lot of Roadhouse (2024) was just him walking around shirtless. Sadly, it seemed that he might’ve just done this because it was the Roadhouse remake. It could be for the name recognition, along with how much money he was paid for it.

Jake Gyllenhaal is one of those actors who seems to give everything he has, both physically and mentally, to a role. He gave everything he had physically to it, as he was in insane shape. But I had a hard time believing he was portraying the character he was portraying. I also didn’t understand his character much either. I didn’t seem to know who he was as a person. This didn’t seem to be a big character for him to sink his teeth into either. That goes for just about every character.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of character arcs or anything really interesting about most of the people in the film. They were all pretty cliché at the end of the day. This can help if this is a turn-your-brain-off type of movie, but at times it didn’t seem that way.

There were only a handful of scenes where it felt like the story kind of fell into place pretty well. That would be the scene where we see Dalton go out on the boat with the love interest of the story named Ellie, who is played by Daniela Melchior. They go out on the water and have a pretty intimate scene, but it’s not long enough. I wanted it to seem longer, so I felt like their relationship could be more fleshed out, but unfortunately, it wasn’t.

It is probably worth mentioning as a positive is the music. I enjoyed some of the song choices, such as Post Malone and Rina Sawayama’s cover of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. Post Malone also had a small role in the film which was fun.

It could’ve just been one of those kinds of movies where it’s just a dumb action flick, but the action isn’t even that good. I know that it seems crazy to say that the action isn’t good in a film with an actual fighter, Connor McGregor. But so much of the fighting in this film is CGI and not even real. This is one of the biggest downsides of the film. If not, the biggest.

I was so frustrated when I started watching the film to see how all the fights were filmed. The camera gets extremely shaky and jumps around different camera angles, making it impossible to keep up with what’s happening. On top of that, they also had CGI in place where we would see most of the punches and kicks land. It was so easy to tell it was fake. It took out almost all of the immersion.

I don’t know why they couldn’t have hired a better stunt coordinator to make it look like the fights were real and they didn’t have to use CGI. John Wick is a great example of a film series that is modern and uses great stunt work without much CGI. Those films use actual combat while being fake, It looks very real. They don’t use CGI to make it look like Punch Land. They rely on the actors to make it look like it’s real.

Even more recently, Dune: Part Two did a great job with combat and not using much CGI. So if the action was better, yeah, this would’ve been a better movie. When do you have this kind of dumb action flick movie all you want is for the action to be good? And that’s what I wanted in Roadhouse (2024) since the characters in the story weren’t that good.

Now, given that the action does get OK near the end, it still doesn’t help for the fact that it isn’t as good as it could be. When you hear Conor McGregor’s in a movie, you’re expecting some pretty insane action. But unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver. It just has a slightly okay action. In the original Roadhouse, you had these insane action sequences that lasted a lot longer, and even though it was the ’80s, they felt better.

Of course, a lot of people will be comparing this one to the original, and you should probably just go in with pretty low expectations. Just go into Roadhouse (2024) expecting a dumb action movie, and you’ll probably be somewhat entertained by the end of it. I was at least entertained throughout the film and wanted to see what happened by the end of Roadhouse (2024).

I think a lot of people going into this movie might just want to see Jake Gyllenhaal be ripped and shirtless throughout the whole movie. And they would get that in this movie so there’s that at least.