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Picking His Fights
The twists and turns of Jake Gyllenhaal’s unlikely, unsettling action career have brought him to Road House.
Read All the Stories No subsequent role has been quite as physical as his latest, Road House, Doug Liman’s remake of the 1989 Rowdy Herrington cult classic that starred Gyllenhaal’s Donnie Darko co-star Patrick Swayze as a bouncer at a rough-and-tumble Missouri honky-tonk. In Ang Lee’s 2005 masterpiece, Brokeback Mountain, in which he and the late Heath Ledger (both Oscar nominated) played two young cowboys who strike a secret gay relationship that lasts for years, he demonstrates a shrinking-violet longing that takes what is already a moody drama and renders it almost unbearably heart-rending. Having such an exacting scene partner was an asset in a production that had spectacular ambitions for the intensity of its brawls — a movie called Road House was always going to live or die by its fight sequences, which had to retain some amount of the original’s “Let’s rumble” ethos.
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