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kind of amusing that two Oscar winners wrote the script for a movie about bank robbing surfers
And yet you were sold completely on Bodhi's (Swayze) lifestyle and charisma to the point you wanted to know what it was like to be caught in a half-pipe.
I'm fine acknowledging Road House as a guilty pleasure, a movie to watch on Bad Movie Night. Maybe enjoy it alongside Top Gun or Deep Blue Sea or Spice World or Con Air or hey ... Surviving the Game.
I'm fine acknowledging Road House as a guilty pleasure, a movie to watch on Bad Movie Night. Maybe enjoy it alongside Top Gun or Deep Blue Sea or Spice World or Con Air or hey ... Surviving the Game.
But a classic?
Yes, it is.
You like Gilmore Girls and (hurts to type suddenly) Downtown Abbey.
I like Road House. I also like "trash" like Hell Comes to Frogtown, The Initiation (the film debut of the wonderful Daphne Zuniga), The Stepfather, Deadly Blessing (now there's an underrated classic), and so on.
I hate Top Gun. Probably the only other popular movie for which I can muster more hate is The Matrix. They are both objectively bad movies. But they have their fans, so I am willing not to scoff too much if someone puts them on their "guilty pleasures" list.
Same with Road House. It's a bad movie. It really is. But in the right mood? Yeah, it can be one of those "so bad it's fun" movies. Watch Road House with Spice World, and you can enjoy trash from both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe top it off with some Mexican wrestling and a bad kung fu movie.
Hey, at least Road House has the decently not to pretend that it's deep. It revels in its shallowness, unlike The Matrix.
How exactly is Road House a "bad" movie, though? It's a better movie than a lot of crap that has come out since. It doesn't pretend to be what it is not. Plus, Ben Gazzara's Brad Wesley is literally the perfect villain, an unforgivable, remorseless mogul who operates above the law and leaves a trail of tears and bodies in his wake. I'll watch Gazzara chew the scenery anytime.
Shoot, compared to the craptastic Action Jackson, which is a solid time-waster (and eye-roller) that shamelessly rides the mojo of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, Road House is Serpico.
Road House is certainly better than the vastly overrated Top Gun. No idea why that thing is considered an '80s classic when Tom has other, better movies from the era, like Risky Business (his best, IMO, and an amazing film), Rain Man, and Cocktail, which is probably also regarded as a "bad" film, but I like it a lot.
The entire movie is a "flex" scene. A flex scene is a scene that exists for no other reason than to show or more of the characters "flexing" their coolness. Example: The beach volleyball scene in Top Gun. Half the scenes in Act 1 of Lethal Weapon. Or my favorites: The "let's flex our muscles" handshake in Predator, or Barry Bostwick on the flying motorcycle at the end of MEGAFORCE.
Road House is just one flex scene after another. It can be fun if you're in the right mood. But it's dumb fun, through and through.
I actually think Swayze was a better actor than most give him credit for, and he had a great scene presence. But movies like Road House and Dirty Dancing are why he got the reputation for being a bit of a movie himbo.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AFtrEFkt
It's a better movie than a lot of crap that has come out since.
Is that really the bar by which you measure a classic? "Hey, it was way better than MEGA FORCE!"
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