SPOILER ALERT: Please watch Road House on Netflix, suspend your disbelief as you do so, then come here to discuss.
Hey 3.5 readers.
Road House. It’s the shittiest awesome movie you’ll ever see, and I say that with all due respect to the late Patrick Swayze and make no mistake, he deserves much respect.
I’ve seen it a couple times over the years, but now, watching it as an adult, it’s a whole new experience.
With most movies, you do have to suspend disbelief. Most movies tell fanciful tales. That’s why we watch them. If we wanted realism, every movie would be a guy sitting at a desk for 8 hours, periodically getting up once in awhile to get a sandwich or take a shit.
But you really have to put your brain on hold for this movie.
The plot is that Dalton, that’s his only name, played by Swayze, is the world’s greatest cooler. A cooler is the head bouncer in a club that employs a squad of bouncers. I had no idea that bouncing had such a high level of professionalism but that’s neither here nor there. Bottomline, a businessman who owns a nightclub or road house in a rural Missouri town goes to NYC to recruit Dalton to clean up his joint, the Double Deuce, for it is a den of depravity, full of assholes who constantly murder each other.
Dalton takes the job on the spot, not giving a shit about his current employer, just taking off that night to drive to Missouri. I mean, what an asshole. Give the guy 2 weeks notice, am I right?
Anyway, Dalton gets to the Double Deuce and that’s when shit starts to go down. The club owner agrees to pay Dalton $500 a night plus he’ll cover any medical expenses. That stands out to me right away. I mean, this is the shittiest bar in existence and somehow the owner has the dough to hire a cooler for $120,000 a year.
On top of that, there are scenes when the bar staff get together for a meeting about how they’re going to help Dalton clean shit up. And there’s like, 50 people working there. Like there’s no way this shitty bar is pulling in enough to cover that much overhead.
Anyway, Dalton gets into some fights with the asshole barflies and sooner or later, he runs across the town bad guy, who employs most of those assholes. Push comes to shove and before he knows it, Dalton is at war with the town bad guy.
Oh, and Dalton gets stabbed one night and meets the town doctor, a hot blonde. He literally calls her Doc. Ironically, the movie is like a modern day western where the lawman comes into town and all the townfolk tell him to give up and just take it up the butt from the town bad guy because the bad guy is too strong.
Moving on, Dalton’s best pal and mentor is Sam Elliot, who is also another great cooler. It’s cool to see Sam Elliot in his younger days though there is a creepy scene where he dances with Doc and looks like he wants to bone her even though she is his buddy’s girlfriend.
By the way, the cops don’t give a shit about this town. There is some passing mention that the town bad guy has all the cops under his thumb but still, I mean, every night people are getting murdered and hacked to pieces and robbed and raped and so on at the Double Deuce and if that’s not enough, a local shop owner’s store gets blown the fuck up because he stands with Dalton against the bad guy. Later, a car dealer stands with Dalton and the bad guy has a henchmen drive a fucking monster truck through his dealership.
All I’m saying is yes, I get it. The local cops are on the bad guy’s take but holy shit, at some point, you’d think the Governor of Missouri would hear about some of the non-stop, daily bar murders and business explosions and send the National Guard in to fuck the bad guy up.
OK, beyond this I won’t say much more, but you should watch it on Netflix and return here to tell me the discrepancies and brain suspensions you have to do for this movie, which honestly, is awesome, make sense.
Some stupidity I noticed, in no particular order:
#1 – The farmer is a shitty negotiator. Dalton asks to rent his room. The farmer says up front well no one wants it because the whole farm smells like horse shit. Wow. Way to negotiate. Maybe little the renter make the first move. See what he’s willing to pay. At any rate, the farmer says he’ll rent this super awesome loft bachelor pad complete with a walk out on rooftop porch that he can (and does) bang hot chicks on and he rents it to him for 100 a month which he says is just some bullshit he has to charge him lest the local church here he is giving shit out for free and they come looking for donations.
#2 – I said it before but I’ll say it again, the math behind the Double Deuce’s payroll structure just does not add up. 50 some odd employees, a house band and a pro cooler making 120,000 a year..,at a bar where stabbings happen every five seconds.
#3 – It takes place in Missouri but in the car dealership scene, you can see a sign for LA and Bakersfield in the distance to the right.
#4 – It is kind of awesome that Dalton knows in advance that bar creeps will fuck up his car so he always drives a broken down beater to work instead of his cherished Mercedes. I’ll actually say that’s one part of this movie that is clever.
#5 – Dalton pulls a knife used to kill his buddy Sam Elliot out of Elliot and uses it to push down the accelerator of his car in an attempt to run the bad guys over. Sorry, but I don’t think that knife would hold the pedal down.
Bookshelf Battle 