-Noah Gittell

Nobody was begging for a remake to “Road House,” a 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle about a bouncer-for-hire who cleans up a rowdy honkey-tonk bar, battles a local gangster, and falls in love with the prettiest, blondest ER doctor in America. The original succeeded as a so-bad-it’s-good action flick that became an ideal watch on a Saturday afternoon on TBS or at a pre-teen boys’ sleepover. If Swayze were still with us, we’d probably have got-ten a legacy sequel by now because even the most minor hit does. As a replacement, we get a slumming Jake Gyllenhaal in a UFC-inflected remake that will bypass theaters and go straight to a streaming network, where it belongs.

The bar in “Road House” is named, simply, Road House, a tip off to how little effort the writers have put in here. Instead of a Missouri saloon with sawdust on the floor and chicken wire around the house band, it’s a tiki bar in the Florida Keys, where proprietor Frankie (Jessica Williams) is trying to fend off attempts by local rich boy Ben Brandt (Billy Magnusson) to put her out of business. He wants to build a luxury resort on the same spot. Whether or not other parcels of land exist on the island is a question that goes unasked. Brandt sends his thugs in every night to make trouble, so Frankie hires disgraced fighter Elwood Dalton (Gyllenhaal) as head bouncer, setting the stage for a series of escalating brawls that cause far more damage to the bar than Brandt’s boys were doing in the first place.

The script by Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry has at least one clever idea: that Dalton is actually a sweet guy who lulls his opponents into complacency with his tender demeanor. “Be nice until it’s time not to be nice,” said Swayze in the original, but there was a ferocity in his stillness, like a samurai or a cowboy in a spaghetti western. The new Dalton is softer. Before he takes on five bad guys in the parking lot, he checks with them to make sure there’s a hospital within driving distance. He then drives them all to the emergency room. One of Brandt’s thugs likens him to Mister Rogers for his kindness and tries to befriend him, even after Dalton breaks his arm.

Other than that, “Road House” has nary a thought in its head. Frankie mentions offhandedly that her uncle was a civil rights activist who took a major risk opening a Black-owned bar in the Florida Keys in the 1960s. Now that’s a movie I’d like to see, but the screenwriters promptly ignore that thread to get back to the bruising.

They invent a love interest for Dalton — a local physician (Daniela Melchior) who just so happens to be the daughter of the county’s crooked sheriff — and even a clever youngster (Hannah Love Lanier) who Dalton can befriend so that we know he’s a good guy at heart. These are the tropes of a classic western, which the film acknowledges ad nauseam, but it never feels imbued with the soul of that classic genre. There is no sense of history or character, and its vistas are flattened by the digital photography.

The original “Road House” wasn’t exactly “The Searchers” either, but everyone involved committed so hard to its sleazy aesthetic that it won you over from the jump. Gyllenhaal is probably a better actor than Swayze, but he’s a worse Dalton. We’re supposed to believe there’s a cauldron of rage under his gee-shucks exterior, but Gyllenhaal can’t summon it. “I’m afraid of what will happen when you push me too far,” he grunts toward the end, but when he finally goes full Hulk, the result is mostly indistinguishable from the film’s previous fight scenes. Gyllenhaal, for all his musculature, is more theater kid than tough guy.

Even the fight scenes themselves, presumably the reason the film exists, fail to inspire a visceral reaction. Director Doug Liman has no creative vision for how they are shot and staged, instead leaping from longish takes to quick cuts to POV shots without cause. Throw in some shoddy CGI in the film’s obligatory action sequences, and you’ve got a film that fails to even measure up to the modest achievements of its antecedent. The original “Road House” was a perfect sleepover movie. This one will just make you fall asleep.