The tough guy: Jake Gyllenhaal may not be Patrick Swayze, but…

“I’m afraid of what happens when someone pushes me to the edge,” Dalton, the character, says Jake Gyllenhaal in this remake of The tough onewith Patrick Swayze.

The tough one (Street housein the original) was not a great success in 1989 while it was in theaters: it cost 17 million dollars and grossed 30 in North America, but then video and cable made it an almost cult film, one of those that if you say Patrick Swayze, Furthermore GhostFrom Dirty dancing and of Limit pointwith Keanu Reeves, remember The tough one.

The new version by Doug Liman, the director of Mr. and Mrs. Smith AND On the edge of tomorrowwhich he shot while preparing his next film with Tom Cruise, features crocodiles, a sheriff named Big Dick, a man walking naked down the street for no apparent reason, and, of course, the same main character, but something different.

Glass Key isn’t Missouri and Jake Gyllenhaal isn’t Patrick Swayze, but who cares.

A few minutes into the film, Dalton (Gyllenhaal) tells a girl, who works at a bookstore across the street (?), that he is there, on Glass Key, in the Florida Keys, to work in a bar . She won’t serve drinks at the bar, but she will clear it of bullies and brawlers, hired by another young woman, Frankie (the African-American Jessica Williams, from the series Shrinkingwith Harrison Ford).

“It sounds like the plot of an old western,” the girl tells him. And yes, you’re right. The basis of many westerns is the arrival of a man in a town who ends up saving it from the bad guys.

Gyllenhaal, replacing Patrick Swayze

Oh, earlier we learned that Dalton had been a UFC fighter, a lethal fighter. A fight is where Frankie goes to look for a new head of security, he already knows who it will be, but when this fighter is afraid of Dalton’s arrival in the ring, Frankie will change options and hire Dalton for $5,000 a week.

In the venue the bands play behind a sort of metal fence, as if to protect it.

Of course, while there are arguments, the band continues to play

Dalton not only has a well-built physique: when he is stabbed, he almost continues to behave as if nothing had happened. Just as he kicks them out of the bar, he drives them to the hospital to have their broken arms treated.

He will be tough, yes, but also a man of principles. Dalton is capable of unspeakable brutality, punctuated with jokes, and uses his knowledge of anatomy to give medical advice to those he targets.

What he doesn’t imagine is that those thugs who cause trouble at the bar are sent by Billy (Lukas Gage), who has inherited power in the area now that his father is in prison. What he wants is to destroy the bar to turn it into a resort and have a direct route to drug trafficking.

And when Knox (Conor McGregor, real-life UFC fighter) arrives, Dalton will have to remember the opening sentence, the one about limits.

But there is someone who, for the actor The secret of the mountain he plays it evenly. He is McGregor, the Irishman who steals every scene in which he appears in this, his first performance. He has more sensitivity than Schwarzenegger, John Cena or The Rock, so we could be faced with a new talent in Hollywood action cinema.

Different but at the same time identical film to the original, it entertains with convincing and violent fight scenes.

“The tough guy”

Action/Suspense. United States, 2024. Original title: “House on the Road”. 121′, SAM 16. From: Doug Liman. With: Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor McGregor, Daniela Melchior, Joaquim de Almeida. Available in: Amazon Prime Video.