While the basic story is predictable, the acting is solid and the music is great. This movie has a lot going for it. The Jeff Healey Band provides much of the movie's soundtrack, playing all through it. This band is really impressive.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 13, 2024

A sweaty and brawny classic of excess and coolness.

| Mar 31, 2024

Not controlled or competent enough to work as a spoof, a serious action flick, or anything in between.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

Silly, yet plays it straight, and everyone involved knows exactly the type of genre-pleaser they’re making... aspires to be nothing more and nothing less than a goofy experiment in translating the arc of the Western lone gunman to being a bouncer.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2024

This titter-worthy picture is basically like 1988's Cocktail with multiple fractures added for good measure.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 15, 2023

Though it came after the era of inner-city grindhouses and rural drive-ins, this absurd yet wildly entertaining honky-tonk action pulp is perfect fodder for both.

| Feb 4, 2023

Herrington sells this collection of broad violence (including a monster truck attack!) and fuming goobers with determination, putting in the effort to turn this 1989 release into the finest drive-in film of the 1970s.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 19, 2022

The true heart of Road House taps into that peculiar, romanticized atmosphere of the Wild West: two dangerously violent-yet-soft-spoken, Southern-gentlemanly alphas, trading war stories and showing battle scars in the presence of a beautiful woman.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2022

...just about gets the job done with hiss-able villains and knockabout camaraderie from the leads...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 4, 2021

Thanks to the film's characteristic '80s unpretentiousness. And films about bouncers were - and still are - few and far between.

| Jun 10, 2021

Rewatching Road House isn't just a snort of nostalgia from a time when cocaine was more prevalent in bathrooms than hand sanitizer. It is a reminder of a whole genre of film that has dried up.

| Original Score: B | Mar 20, 2020

Bouncer tames bar in '80s classic; sex, violence, drinking.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 6, 2019

...it isn't just so bad it's good. In its own bad way, it really is good!

| Jul 12, 2019

But in deep "Road House" country... and the undefined made crassly visible, there isn't a whiff of romance anywhere, any more than there's a single jot of common sense.

| Mar 27, 2019

Can Swayze sustain a lead role? Yes. Can he sustain Road House? No.

| Mar 26, 2019

It's pointless, mean-spiritede, excessively violent and, perhaps worst of all, just plain dumb.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 26, 2019

What results instead is a monstrous hybrid-a grotesquely implausible, oversized character that thoroughly overshadows the poor actor himself.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 26, 2019

This gloriously brainless modern-day western is a treat from start to finish, and possibly the one and only time that a bouncer will ever get the full Hollywood hero treatment.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 26, 2019

It's amazing how quickly an explosion, a ripped-out throat, or even four bangs in a row, can make other problems seem insignificant.

| Mar 26, 2019

Vulgarity isn't the movie's main vice. Hypocrisy is.

| Mar 26, 2019