Luis Martinez

Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-9:43 p.m.

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The 80s were a deeply stupid decade. And they were to such an extent that few periods in the history of cinema have accumulated so many productions that time has turned into cult objects, not just films. It's not easy to define what it is that transforms a generally bad (or just crappy) movie into an artifact worthy of veneration, but the truth is that there is no way to plan anything in advance.

A genuinely cult film is one by accident, by mistake, by euphoria or by simply being sacrilegious.

There are no rules or, better yet, the only rule that keeps it standing is its resistance to being digested by precisely some rules.

Sometimes, what attracts attention is the strange, the strange, the prodigious or just the different. Or even inept. For this reason, we said, stupidity has so many chances of ending up on an altar. But in general these are productions that demand to be contemplated with a dangerously

camp

sensibility in the sense that Susan Sontag understood it in her classic study of

kitsch

. A cult film is seen not as what it is but as a representation of what perhaps could have been or wanted to be or ended up being without intending to.

That is, a cult film is seen in quotes or, depending on the style book used, in italics.

In fact, you don't even see what you see, but rather you see through it with your attention focused on the world of added meanings that it raises in its wake.

Road House. By profession: tough,

Doug Liman's film recently released on Prime Video directly and without going through the theaters, much to the director's annoyance (he left it in writing in an incendiary article against the production company in

Deadline

magazine ), wants to be from the first second cult film.

And he aspires to this, among other reasons, because of the shameless display of stupidity that he displays in each of his shots.

It can't be a coincidence that all the characters, from first to last, make such a methodical, and even intelligent, effort to say nonsense without pressing the pause button at any time. The list of bullshit is long. The stab wound that the protagonist

Jake Gyllenhaal

exhibits as soon as he begins as if he had been bitten by a mosquito and the presentation in the film (and in the history of cinema) of the professional wrestler

Conor McGregor

completely naked in Italy (after being surprised by a cuckolded husband ) are just two examples. Colorful but only examples. The fact that the police chief played by

Joaquim de Almeida

is called Big Dick and that the image offered of Florida today is in no way different from that of Manhattan in John Carpenter's

1997 classic.

: Rescue in New York

add context to a text that, in truth, is not such. Liman, in fact, knows that cult films are just context.

To situate ourselves,

Road House

tells the story of a nightclub bouncer (a bar, in this case) with the unlikely mission of delivering justice. Or just order. Of course, with a bang.

It's not Koldo, the one with the masks, but Gyllenhaal.

He is a professional wrestler with a sad past and a disillusioned philosopher with a complicated present. The future is not even expected. What our hero didn't imagine (or he did, but he kept it quiet) is that it wasn't just a place with a bad reputation, but that it is actually the target of the local mafia that wants the slum for drug trafficking and commission purposes. . In short, not only will he have to deal with a few drunken pimps, but what he has in front of him is simply the biggest one. Indeed, there is a lot of shit to give there. "Is there anything more fun than a bar fight?" asks the director. There is also, in the most rancidly macho tradition, a girl, of course.

It could be said that this is probably the first modern film that claims to be a cult film before even being one and that its only motivation is for us to make it our own due to the always alert desire of any cinephile, or less, to embrace infamy. The fact that it is a

remake

of, this one, a

professionally

cult film like the film of the same title thrown to the dogs in 1989 by director

Rowdy Herrington

only confirms the already non-existent suspicions. That film starring

Patrick Swayze,

who had already become a grima and cult star thanks to

Dirty Dancing,

brought renewed air to viewers at the time who were so accustomed to stunning productions with a single concept and whose greatest merit was to spectacularize simplicity. It was an action film like so many others since

Cornered

(with Stallone),

Missing in Action

(with Chuck Norris) or

Bloody Battle

(with Van Damme), but with an unprecedented verism varnished with a thin layer of cinematographic intellectualism. In it, according to the most classic

Western

pattern (the lone gunman who redeems himself by protecting the innocent), the fights were real, hardly any doubles were used and the chronicles of those injured during filming ended up becoming legend.

Let's say that the first

eighties

version of

Road house

acquired its cult character by differentiating itself from its competition by subtracting, rather than adding, stupidity to its guiding principles.

Herrington's proposal knew itself to represent the action cinema of its time.

The way he put himself in quotes (to continue with Sontag's analogy) was adding dignity to the production. And this was recognized by its acolytes, who have only grown since then and who regard it as a rarity of proven quality among the obvious filth of all contemporary production.

It is important to take into account and keep in mind the very concept of stupidity to become aware of the phenomenon. Stupidity gets a bad press. Deleuze maintains that the task of philosophy is to "detest stupidity" and, in general, the argument of a wise conversation is wisdom, not stupidity. But this (as the thinker Johann Ed. Erdmann reminds us) heals us in its own way.

Stupidity reminds us of our own defects

and, as soon as it appears, it takes us back to the moment before we became civilized and sensible. In its own way, stupidity is, much more genuinely than wisdom, what binds us to a primordial state, our own and perfectly identifiable. And therefore, its ability to provoke nostalgia, attachment or just affection. Few decades, as far as cinema is concerned (also in more areas, the truth), are as stupidly nostalgic as the 80s and hence, their propensity for cult.

The new

Road House

takes everything from its predecessor: its originality against the grain, its passion for verismo, its distant references to

Westerns

and, above all, its complete and conscious stupidity. The fact that it has been necessarily unfairly repudiated by Prime Video (

"More concerned with plumbing than cinema,"

according to Liman); the fact that the director (himself the author of masterful action summits such as

The Bourne Affair

and

Edge of Tomorrow)

has refused to promote it to stage the protest; that its protagonist Gyllenhaal previously coincided with his "inspiration" Patrick Swayze in

Donnie Darko

(the most cult film of all cult films), or that it is impossible to contemplate each of the scenes (special mention for that crazy ending until the infinite) without asking "But what the hell is this?" They are nothing more than evidence upon confirmation that

Road House. By profession: Duro

does not want to be a film, but rather an artifact, a phenomenon, a

meme

, a

hashtag

, a

trending topic

... a very stupid cult phenomenon before it even becomes one. All very stupid. All very cult.