‘Road House’ Director Doug Liman’s Studio Star Vehicles Are Always Refreshingly Uneven, Unpredictable, and Weirdly Alive

If you heard around the year 2000 that the director of Swingers and Go had signed on to remake the 1989 action movie Road House, you might sigh with trepidation over another seemingly independent-minded filmmaker getting sucked into a vortex of Hollywood pointlessness. Then you might patiently wait for the movie to flop and bust him back to the smaller-budget world where he clearly flourishes. But the strangest thing about the career of director Doug Liman isn’t that he would wind up remaking Road House after such a promisingly scrappy start back in the 1990s; it’s that in 2024, the new version of Road House feels weirdly of a piece with Liman’s other films. He hasn’t made recent studio-feuding headlines by prematurely denouncing his own selling out; he’s made them by angrily insisting that his new movie deserves to be seen in a theater, rather than heading straight to streaming. Whatever he’s up to, Doug Liman is taking it seriously.

Maybe he’s still sensitive about the fact that his first movie, the little-seen dark comedy Getting In, was sent direct to video back in 1994. Liman got a quick reboot of sorts when he directed the 1996 indie comedy Swingers, which is now more closely associated with screenwriter and star Jon Favreau (himself no stranger to corporate-sponsored fare). But with Swingers and its 1999 follow-up Go, Liman established himself as snappy, scrappy chronicler of post-Tarantino semi-youth culture, following would-be scenesters and some actual dirtbags on their misadventures, often involving side trips to Las Vegas. A quarter-century later, Go may look dated in some of its fashions or cultural preoccupations, but it’s still a fast, funny crime comedy – one of the only Pulp Fiction knockoffs that feels like it occupies its own distinct milieu, perhaps due to Liman’s admitted tendency toward “chaotic” shoots that find the movie as he goes rather than working from a strict and disciplined blueprint.

Liman’s jump to bigger projects came with The Bourne Identity, though he retained enough of that old chaos during filming that the studio kept him off the many subsequent sequels. Throughout his “sellout trilogy,” as he once called it, you can sense that creative process starting to wobble, the wheels about to come off: The messy but icon-heavy Mr. and Mrs. Smith gets by on its star power and occasional, mildly Soderberghian touches, and Jumper (or as my tour guide at the Coliseum in Rome referred to it when listing movies that filmed there, The Jumper) should be a good fit for Liman’s immediate, itchy style, but collapses in a heap of YA franchise spare parts. His subsequent big-to-small-to-big swings have only occasionally seemed strategic, even when, by the vagaries of studio release schedules, his last bunch of movies have been released in complementary size-contrasting bursts: The stripped-down war actioner The Wall and one of Tom Cruise’s only non-franchise movies American Made months apart in 2017; the long-delayed sci-fi YA picture Chaos Walking and the antsy COVID project Locked Down even closer together in 2021.

Road House is sort of both scales at once; a splashy, star-vehicle action movie on one hand, a straight-to-streaming remake of an unambitious exploitation movie on the other. Tackling a disreputable cult classic, Liman has a few tricks he uses incessantly, primarily whip-panning his camera around so ostentatiously, and at such canted angles, that it looks virtual, like the more heightened sequences in James Wan’s Aquaman movies, only without the high-fantasy imagery. The fight scenes are more elaborate and sustained than in the 1989 original, and also, befitting this era of filmmaking, look way more fake. Thematically or formally, it’s hard to draw many connections between this movie and, say, Go, other than a sly sense of humor and an unflagging energy.

At the same time, there is a kind of knockabout unity among most of Liman’s films. It’s best encapsulated by his best big-budget movie, maybe even his best movie full stop: Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt time-loop adventure. While following the incremental growth of a callow military public relations officer (Cruise) as he lives, dies, and re-lives the same ill-fated battle with hostile alien invaders, Liman finds a lively rhythm to Cruise’s repeated demise, mixing montages and more sustained sequences with abandon. It feels like the movie he was looking for during Jumper or Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the perfect vehicle for the restlessness of his scrappy very ’90s comedies – and for Tom Cruise, too, at a time when his star-driven career moves threatened to feel overly brand-managed.

The same nearly happens with Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House, albeit at a lower wattage and with bigger caveats about his own later-career tendencies: The movie feels tailored, on the fly, to Gyllenhaal’s personality, just as Mr. and Mrs. Smith refashioned itself around Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie almost instinctively, and Bourne Identity turned into a signature level-up for Matt Damon despite a seemingly interchangeable blank of a lead character. Still, nothing in those movies has the bittersweet romantic soul that emerges from Edge of Tomorrow, where Cruise does his most effective audience-surrogate work of the past 20 years simply by quietly falling in love with Emily Blunt while repeatedly getting shot down – literally. Just limiting the comparison to action-movie skills, nothing in Road House has Tomorrow’s slam-bang slyness, even when Liman seems interested in using CG action to bend and stretch the laws of physics, like a scene where a pickup truck bears down on Gyllenhaal, throws into reverse, and somehow manages to force-scoop him up and yeet him off a bridge. The visual effects of the scene are dodgy, yet there’s more muscle behind this fakery than in similar moments from, say, Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle. Throughout the movie, Liman slides in and out of the uncanny valley; I still have next to no idea whether or not he can be described as good at directing action. I do know that the sloppy-by-design Vegas car chase in Go has a lot more juice than anything that happens in Jumper or most of the cartoony face-offs in Road House (or even the comparably stripped-down The Wall).

Why, then, does Doug Liman making junk like Road House still sound weirdly promising? How did I so enjoy, for example, his seemingly intentionally annoying marital-disintegration caper movie Locked Down, as well as his computerized Road House and even the largely ignored/reviled Chaos Walking? I think it’s because there’s something genuinely flaky and erratic about Liman that often makes his bigger-budget movies uneven, unpredictable, and weirdly alive. On paper, Road House is everything wrong with reboot culture: It tries to steal the valor of a movie with an organic, cable-grown cult following; it slathers its “updates” in unconvincing special effects; it actively wastes the time of multiple talented performers; it chucks any chance to say anything (beyond pointing out its own questionable bona fides as a quasi-western) with reckless abandon. In reality, the movie fakes it until it makes it. Maybe that’s why so much of Liman’s disparate, uneven work still feels spiritually connected to Swingers: Those guys bumbled, wheedled, and improvised their way toward unlikely charm, too.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.