“Road House” seems like the ultimate celebration of violence, music and nudity. It’s an absurd yet predictable film with lots of enjoyable scenes but a completely nonsensical story to tie it altogether. It’s not exactly a bad movie but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a good one either.

Dalton (Patrick Swayze “Dirty Dancing”, “Point Break”) is a famous bouncer (or ‘cooler’ as the film refers to him) that is hired to tame the Double Deuce, a particularly rowdy bar. After tackling troublesome customers, Dalton soon finds himself up against a local businessman (Ben Gazzara “The Big Lebowski”), who exploits the community through use of intimidation and violence.

Patrick Swayze gets some cheerfully silly lines such as when he instructs his colleagues ‘to be nice until it’s time not to be nice’. Physically, he gives a very impressive performance as there are a lot of fairly impressive fight scenes. He was apparently trained by Benny Urquidez (“Dragons Forever”). Kelly Lynch (“Virtuosity”, “Drugstore Cowboy”) is okay as the love interest Doc. The chemistry between the two could have been significantly better. Sam Elliott (“Hulk”) is entertaining as Dalton’s pal Wade. Ben Gazzara is quite good as Brad Wesley. The other characters are okay.

The idea of a famous bouncer is quite frankly laughable yet it seems to almost work considering how cheesy the rest of the film is. We have a scene with monster trucks and we have a moment where a guy gets knocked out by a dead polar bear. It’s strange because while the movie is so childish, it also has a lot of mature content such as graphic violence, lots of nudity and bad language. I did dislike how the film became increasingly clichéd and predictable as I knew almost exactly what was going to happen. It’s definitely an interesting movie and maybe worth checking out if you like over-the-top 80s movies but it’s not exactly good.