SXSW Film Festival 2024: ROAD HOUSE, MONKEY MAN & THE FALL GUY

The action genre is alive and well here at SXSW. With last year’s secret screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 being a huge hit, with an unforgettable experience with the crowd (Shoutout to the woman who yelled “GET UP KEANU!” during the movie), it felt only natural to try to go bigger in 2024.

Three of the biggest headliners this year are action movies, featuring some of the craziest balls-to-the-wall fist fights and stunts that must be seen on a big screen. The best part about it is we have ourselves three completely different types of movies. Frankly, they are all worth your time, for their own reasons.

Road House (Doug Liman)

Built as a re-imagining of the 1989 original starring Patrick Swayze, this new Road House, for better or for worse, is its own animal. The formula of our male lead acting as a bouncer for a club that’s attracting bad clients is still there, but as clear as day, director Doug Liman and team have taken the testosterone to a whole new level by embracing the world of the Ultimate Fighting Champion (UFC). Jake Gyllenhaal plays Elwood Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter with a dark past, who reluctantly travels to the Florida Keys to help roadhouse owner Frankie (Jessica Williams, The Daily Show), in a manner that obviously calls back to lone gunslingers in Western movies who arrive to protect a saloon from a gang of baddies.

Road House (2024)- source: SXSW Film Festival

The writing can seemingly be all over the place. Dialogue often feels throwaway, and any attempt to sound self-aware or referential comes across as more on the nose. Not much deep character work can be found here either. The script does an effective job of creating a suspenseful environment where everyone recognizes Dalton or knows about what happened, but as we slowly come to the reveal of what that dark past is, the film doesn’t really create a compelling internal struggle for him to overcome. As much as one can enjoy seeing Gyllenhaal and Daniela Melchior share the screen together, the relationship between the two is a bit too simplistic.

It’s no doubt that Road House gets bogged down when it’s being serious, since there seems to be little interest in actually diving into meaty (pardon the pun) roles and drama. Thankfully Liman and Gyllenhaal do their best in keeping the overall tone of Road House light and silly. Gyllenhaal’s Dalton fights in a hilarious manner, being so clearly better than all the bad guys that we take great pleasure in watching him embarrass the guys to no end. Even the leader of the gang, played brilliantly by Billy Magnussen, strikes that fun balance of being intimidating enough but also waiting to get his ass kicked. The bad one-liners are delivered with such confidence, they bring back memories of classic 80s to 90s action movies.

The movie then escalates into a whole other stratosphere once UFC champion Conor McGregor enters the picture. With Road House being his first acting credit, McGregor is on some next-level scenery chewing with his villainous role Knox. Seeing Gyllenhaal and McGregor take on each other shirtless is the exact kind of douche-bro stupidity that I miss from action movies.

You shouldn’t be looking for anything meaningful in Road House, and for fans of the original film, that’s probably a huge disappointment. But there are those movies that fulfill that niche role of playing on TV at 2am, and whether you are drunk or a bit high, those movies are the fucking best at that moment. Road House is that movie, and I think everyone on board knew it from the start.

Monkey Man (Dev Patel)

Dev Patel introduced his directorial debut Monkey Man as a love letter to the action cinema he grew up with. Though the simple shortcut description is to describe Monkey Man as “an Indian John Wick,” the work itself is more indicative of Patel’s love for Bruce Lee, Indonesian cinema, and even Korean cinema. Another striking comment he made is on the state of action films in Hollywood, that most of them are sadly mindless and made only for a quick buck. He passionately explains that he wanted to make Monkey Man hurt. He wanted to not only make a great action movie, but a movie with soul and trauma and culture. It is my great pleasure to report that you will feel every ounce of that passion in every frame of Monkey Man.

Monkey Man (2024)- source: SXSW Film Festival

Patel plays an underground boxer, only known as Kid, who makes money by purposely throwing fights. In other words, he makes a living by getting the shit kicked out of him. As we follow his lifestyle, in the crowded and dense world of the fictional city Yatana (which I have been told is essentially Mumbai), we see that he is constantly haunted by his past and carried by his childhood. Through the film’s beautiful cinematography and thoughtful editing, we piece together the tragic loss of his mother (Adithi Kalkunte) the same time we see how he was raised, as a bright young soul whose eyes were opened to myth and nature. One element that he still holds onto to the present day is the Hindu monkey deity Hanuman, as the “Monkey Man” shapes his entire being into one searching for vengeance. Underneath all the years of violence and suppressed rage is a man looking to enact his revenge on those who murdered his mother, who destroyed his home, and wronged countless other people for power.

The film works brilliantly with this simple premise of revenge. For most of the first half, we watch Kid methodically work his way up the ranks, starting with getting a job at a high-end brothel, run by the heartless Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar). Is he after her? Her boss? One of the VIP guests? With Kid being often a quiet character, Patel creates a steady atmosphere of tension, as we wonder just who it is that will cause Kid to snap. Then he finally sees him: corrupt police chief Rana (Sikandar Kher). Like some of the best martial arts revenge movies, the film does an immaculate job at making you hate this villain.

But Monkey Man is more than just a bloody good time. Patel takes his time in letting the story evolve into something bigger than just revenge. Though the film admittedly slows down midway through, the decision is in service of making the fight mean something. As Kid is taken in by the hijra community, he undergoes a transformation in finding a greater purpose. The question shouldn’t just be what Rana and the corrupt police have done, but who they did it for and why they did it. Patel doesn’t shy away in incorporating footage of riots in India, as Monkey Man morphs into a political interrogation on Hinduism, sectarian violence, and the political state of the country.

Through a genuinely innovative training sequence, Monkey Man trusts moviegoers to have the patience to “earn” the action. This isn’t to say that the film involves no action for an entire hour, far from it. But the film performs a neat trick in how we become emotionally invested in the third act. Watching a man kill countless people in the name of revenge feels one way to the crowd, but watching a man and his found community kill countless people in the name of revolution is another. All the while, Patel maintains a beautifully compelling marriage of modern day uprising with traditional mythologies. The action is gnarly, well-choreographed, and brutal in its handheld movement. The blood, sweat, and tears are all over the floor here. For an action directorial debut, Monkey Man is no doubt an explosive one. It’s as dirty and grimy as you can get, and it’s a sign of more ferocious talent to come.

The Fall Guy (David Leitch)

It’s so funny and inspiring to see that even for a filmmaker known for big budget blockbusters like Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train, David Leitch lets us know mere minutes into The Fall Guy that this premise is a lot more personal to him and any other project he’s done to date. That is because Leitch started off as a stunt performer and stunt coordinator, a whole world of crew that operate behind the scenes and below the line.

Our main stunt guy is Colt (Ryan Gosling), a successful stunt performer with a blossoming relationship with camera operator Jody (Emily Blunt). It seems like the two of them have their lives figured out. The film begins and we’re already shipping them both. And then suddenly, Colt experiences a terrible stunt accident, one that results in him leaving everything behind, from the profession to the art to even Jody. When suddenly presented a chance to come back into the fray, in a new upcoming movie project where Jody is now the director, Colt feels like this is his chance for redemption. There’s also an entire silly crime abduction plotline going on the side, where action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the star actor Colt performs for who is tied to Jody’s project, goes missing.

The Fall Guy (2024)- source: SXSW Film Festival

Leitch keeps the heart of The Fall Guy on our two leads. The humor and romance is so refreshing here, almost like we’re going back to a time where big movies were led by movie stars and beautiful stunt work and not the oversaturated gobbledygook of CGI lore-world-building. This is less about being a stab towards films like Dune or Avatar and more so about reminding moviegoers that movies can be so fun and simple if you just get the people right. The Fall Guy is a movie designed for fun and laughs, and for that reason, it may be the best (or at least most endearing) piece of work from Leitch so far.

The star power behind Gosling and Blunt radiates throughout, whether it’s from them sharing scenes together and throwing petty subtext dialogue at each other or from carrying scenes with their own independent charisma. Gosling brings back his line deliveries, panicked screaming, and facial expressions when reacting to crazy things around him, in the same exact vein as The Nice Guys, while Blunt channels some “straight man” comedy in Jody as a director constantly trying to keep her cool while the production is always on the verge of going wrong.

Some of the supporting cast gets to have fun here too, particularly Winston Duke as Colt’s new boss, the stunt coordinator of Jody’s production. With half of the movie relying on actor-on-actor charisma and the other half on exciting stunt work, The Fall Guy is an irresistible blockbuster. But the one component that gives it that edge is the thematic undercurrents in the plot. As silly as the mystery crime plotline can be, it holds some stark relevance to industry concerns today, with the rise of AI and the troubling schemes of deep fakes. All the while, the stakes in the plot touches on the very real problem of stunt performers being uncredited and unseen roles. They put their lives on the line to get that shot, and no matter how badly the stunt may hurt, they give the thumbs up so the crew can move on or go for another take. Leitch and his cast passionately touch on this, whether it is from the cautionary point of view with the plot or the sincere celebration of it with the characters we’re following.

The Fall Guy isn’t just romantic about its two leads (which it totally is, by the way) getting back together, but it is also romantic about the work they do. When tens of thousands of talented people can help make a crazy idea come true that will later inspire the next generation of filmmakers, it’s a beautiful thing. In today’s Hollywood assembly line of one CGI fest after another, The Fall Guy feels like a nostalgic trip back, a nudge towards how movies used to be and should be more like – sincere and fun and romantic – all while being an unapologetic celebration of crew.