We've had new versions of 'Point Blank' and 'Red Dawn'.
But now with Doug Liman remaking 'Road House,' is there no Patrick Swayze movie Hollywood wouldn't remake?
The original 1989 action movie was a cheesy thriller about a professional bouncer haunted by the memory of a man he killed in self defence.
Swayze's James Dalton is hired to clean up a notoriously rough club in Missouri known for outbreaks or violence and ends up brushing up against a local crimelord.
A ridiculous sweaty action movie, it was a minor hit that was slated by critics but subsequently built up a cult reputation as one of those films that are so bad they might be fun.
The 2024 version of 'Road House' sees Liman and his screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi, David Lee Hendry and Charles Mondry reimagine Swayze's character as Jake Gyllenhaal's Elwood Dalton, a former UCF middleweight cage fighter haunted by a past contest.
It relocates the action from Missouri to the Florida keys and turns the road house owner who hires him from Kevin Tighe's Frank Tilman to Jessica Williams' Frankie.
Dalton makes a living in an underground fight club scam but is lured into taking up Frankie's offer of a job providing security at her bar after he is stabbed in a parking lot and is then nearly killed by a freight train after sleeping in his car.
Heading to the Key where Frankie's rough bar called The Road House is based, he is secretive about his past but quickly befriends Hannah Lannier's chatty teenager Charlie who works in a bookstore with her dad, Kevin Carroll's Stephen.
Arriving at the Road House, he sits at the bar and witnesses the staff, Lukas Gage's Billy and B K Cannon's Laura struggling to control its violent clientele while bands perform behind a caged stage.
In particular, the staff have to deal with a particularly thuggish biker gang led by JD Pardo's meatheaded Dill and featuring Catfish Jean's Clyde and Arturo Castro's nervous Moe.
Confronting Dill and his associates, Dalton draws them out of the club into the parking lot and earns his crust by neatly dispatching them when they won't listen to his pleas to avoid a fight.
Dill's gang are stunned and a little humiliated when he drives them to the local hospital's accident and emergency, where he encounters Daniela Melchior's doctor Ellie who notices his stab wound which has reopened and treats him.
We learn Dill is working for a local drug kingpin, Billy Magnusen's Ben Brandt whose daddy prospered in the town until he was imprisoned.
The Brandts have designs on The Road House, hoping to force Frankie to sell up so they can apparently turn it into a real estate development for the wealthy.
However she is resisting.
When it appears Ben and his goons are incapable of intimidating her thanks to Dalton's fighting skills, his dad sends Conor McGregor's unhinged Mob enforcer Knox instead.
We learn early on that Knox is the kind of guy whose idea of clothes shopping is assaulting a person he spots on the street whose jacket he likes.
With Brandt unleashing Knox and trying to get inside of Dalton's head about his cage fighting past, our hero realises Ellie's father, Joaquim de Almeida's Sheriff "Big Dick" is also in the pay of the gang.
However when they burn down Charlie's bookshop, it triggers him and Brandt and Knox soon realise they really won't like Dalton when he's angry.
With movies like 'Swingers,' 'Go,' and 'American Made' under his belt, Liman has nothing to prove as a Hollywood director.
He has proven himself too as an accomplished action director with the original 'The Bourne Identity' movie and 'Edge of Tomorrow' particularly standing out.
'Road House' sees him and Gyllenhaal embrace the cheesiness of the original.
However they might have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for a piece of woeful miscasting.
Conor McGregor struts around (sometimes bare bottomed) and grins as a couldn't care less thug.
However he delivers his lines like a five year old in a Dublin nativity play.
It's a really distracting performance because it is so terrible, undoing all the work of Liman and his cast.
What's really depressing is the producers seem to think McGregor is the film's greatest asset, as its marketing on Amazon Prime illustrates.
Even worse, they seem to have browbeaten Liman into just letting the former cagefighter run amok.
Imagine Uncle Bren in 'Kin' intermediately after a lobotomy and that would still be more watchable than this performance.
Gyllenhaal is an amiable presence onscreen and Williams as vivacious as ever.
Magnusen hams it up a little as Ben Brandt and Castro amuses as the weasly Moe.
But while those performances might have elevated this 2024 version of 'Road House' from the outright cheese, McGregor just spreads blue mould all over it.
It's not the film's only weakness.
Liman's use of CGI effects during the movie's many fight sequences is also really jarring - making it look at times like a Playstation game.
The real tragedy is there are some decent things about this film - Henry Braham's cinematography works well when it isn't being undermined by the shonky visual effects.
© Amazon MGM StudiosThere are some amusing nods to classic Westerns, 'Miami Vice,' 'The Blues Brothers' and 'The Untouchables'.
Unfortunately a potential guilty pleasure is ruined by the latest ego to land on our screens.
Don't be surprised if McGregor is given more roles in action movies of even worse quality than this.
At least, it will make Jean Claude Van Damme feel like he's Daniel Day Lewis.
('Road House' received its premiere at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin on March 8, 2024 before being made available for streaming on Amazon Prime on March 21, 2024)
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