Within the pantheon of so-bad-it’s-actually-good motion pictures, few can compete with the unique Highway Home. Made within the prime of Patrick Swayze’s star profession, simply after Soiled Dancing and simply earlier than Ghost and Level Break, it is probably the most charmingly ridiculous motion movies ever made. The plot is straightforward, virtually mystical, extra like a Sergio Leone Western than a typical 80s beat-’em-up: a well-known bouncer Dalton (Swayze) is employed from out of city to wash up a rowdy saloon, and, within the course of, the corruption of the small Missouri city the place the bar is situated. There are lots of rowdy bar fights, some gratuitous nudity, and a late-film sequence the place Sam Elliot exhibits up and he and Swayze drink, dance, struggle, and discuss shit for what seems to be about 72 hours straight with out sleeping.
Additionally, there is a scene the place Swayze kills a neighborhood thug by actually ripping his throat out. Someway, it is all much more superior than it sounds.
When Highway Home hit theaters in 1989, critics gave it a convincing thumbs down, calling it tacky, exploitative, and a bit of dim. It was trash. Effectively, sure. However that was form of the purpose. The film ultimately discovered its method to cult standing, turning into a wink-wink favourite amongst a sure form of motion fan. Partly, that is due to its specific alchemy of movie-star charisma—the easily cool means Swayze delivers Dalton’s hammy traces—and its bizarre particulars: There is a scene with a monster truck! The bar has a home band led by a blind guitar participant! Dalton is not only a bouncer, he is additionally a New York College philosophy grad!
However partly it is as a result of, within the following decade, it grew to become one of many most-shown motion pictures on TV. Highway Home was a fixture on cable networks within the Nineties, particularly late at evening, to the purpose the place it generally appeared like a time-filling crutch for cable community programmers. Want one thing to air after 9 p.m.? Why not Highway Home?
Highway Home wasn’t a film that you just sat down and watched from starting to finish. It was a liminal house within the pre-streaming cable-verse that sucked you in whereas channel browsing late at evening, the black gap of 90s cable TV. It was so unhealthy it was good, sure, nevertheless it was one thing past that, one thing purer and stranger. Over years of watching it in late-night snippets between infomercials, letting it numb you into sleep as a form of non-pharmaceutical insomnia remedy, it simply wore you down. As Dalton says, “Pain don’t hurt.” Yeaaaah, man.
It was inevitable, then, that in some unspecified time in the future there can be a remake. That time is now, with the discharge of Highway Home (2024), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Doug Liman. Each Gyllenhaal and Liman are, in their very own methods, formidable Hollywood skills. Liman is the director of enjoyably punchy blockbusters like Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Fringe of Tomorrow. Gyllenhaal, at 42, is probably the quirkiest of in the present day’s early middle-aged male film stars. Nobody will ever recreate Swayze’s specific charisma, his mix of dancer’s physicality and proto-bro zen, however Gyllenhaal has an offbeat allure of his personal. And like Swayze in his prime—extra so, frankly—he is outrageously ripped.
The brand new Highway Home, then, is generally a film about Gyllenhaal, as soon as once more taking part in a well-known bouncer named Dalton, taking his shirt off and beating the crap out of different dudes whereas saving a bar—now primarily based within the Florida Keys—from a rapacious native businessman (Billy Magnussen) and his military of thugs. It is amusing at instances, with Gyllenhaal taking part in Dalton as laconic and understated, in distinction to the outsize shenanigans of the baddies round him. The film’s finest moments are its weirdest—odd one-liners, an offbeat henchman, a not-quite-random assault by a crocodile.
However the CG-assisted struggle scenes are too slick, with whip pan, digitally stitched-together images that does not exhibit the performers’ physicality. That is a disgrace, for the reason that film has additionally given Dalton a brand new backstory as a UFC fighter, and forged UFC fighter Conor McGregor because the scenery-chewing robust man Knox. Apart from the crocodile gag, the Florida setting is under-utilized, and the oddball characters on the bar do not make a lot of an affect. The film feels caught within the no-man’s-land between high quality blockbuster filmmaking and trashy direct-to-streaming motion. It is perfunctory, and I am unable to think about watching it once more even as soon as, a lot much less time and again as a late-night indulgence.
The brand new Highway Home isn’t a nasty film, precisely, nevertheless it’s not a very good one both—and, somewhat disappointingly given its heritage, it is actually not so unhealthy it is good.