Road House was… fine. Is that underselling it? I’m not sure, the context in which I saw it makes it hard to judge. It did some things really well, but felt extremely predictable. Maybe my viewing experience was skewed: I watched this on the same flight where I saw Madame Web, and I watched the two movies back to back. Thus, I can’t talk about this movie without talking about Madame Web again.

Road House stood in stark contrast with Madame Web. 

Road House didn’t feel like it was doing much that was new. It didn’t feel like it was experimenting with cool narrative ideas. It did have fun fight choreography. And it sold its fight scenes spectacularly, which I appreciated—apparently it experimented with new techniques for filming and editing together multiple takes to better sell some of its hard hits. This involved using CGI to combine takes of actors being hit in the face with big pads with takes of actors punching big pads, with the final result looking pretty good at full speed. If you’re not going to have all your performers actually getting punched in the face, a la older Hong Kong action films or the newer American versions like John Wick, this movie’s technique seems like a decent way to approach a more convincing fight scene.

Where Road House played with technique, Madame Web felt like it was trying out fun new ideas, and giving us the stories of characters we don’t usually follow in its genre (because movies about female superheroes are still playing catch up with the male-led superhero movies). By comparison Road House was… traditional. It had some newer aesthetics, but it didn’t feel new. That’s unsurprising, as it’s literally a remake of a movie from 1989. I haven’t seen the original, so I can’t speak to how much changed, but I think the point stands. Madame Web was doing new things, Road House was re-doing old things.

Unfortunately for Madame Web in this comparison, Road House felt like it knew what it was doing the whole time. Every element felt like it was pulling in the same direction. I spent large portions of Madame Web wondering how the narrative would build towards its promised conclusion—even at times wondering what the promised conclusion really was—and feeling too disconnected from the journey to really be along for the ride. Watching Road House, I knew each plot beat as it landed and never felt like I was being misled by the movie’s narrative sign posts. Road House was trite, but it did trite competently.

That triteness and that competence felt like they were at war with each other. The competence soothed me, left me wanting to settle in and enjoy the good craftsmanship. Yet the trite patterns, the clearly marked narrative path from “Friendly Smiley Fight Guy” to “No More Mr Nice Guy,” it was all so predictable that it felt like a disservice to the film’s overall competence. It rendered what could have been a really exciting, competently made movie into something that felt a bit like comfort food—if your comfort food includes watching people being very violent with their fists and uncovering some unresolved emotional trauma (that remains unresolved, I think). 

All of that is to say, this movie could have been a contender. Instead I’d relegate it to the “good enough but not great” category.

Maybe that’s not giving enough credit where credit is due. There are a lot of old films that serve as genre touchstones, films at risk of being genre-canonized. This movie can replace some of them! It’s newer, it’s less regressive, it’s better made… all of these things are important. Slot this in when you need a punchy “No More Mr Nice Guy” movie. Just don’t expect a revolution.