Doug Liman’s adaptation of Road House is an ingenious spin on the 80s classic, retaining its camp intensity while also updating it to an even more fractious American culture. This time around, the bouncer in question is Elwood Dalton, a former UFC fighter played by Jake Gyllenhaal, while the road house that employs him as security guard is located in the Florida Keys, rather than the Deep South. Right from the start, that produces a more expansive and porous sense of space, and an even more ingenious callback to the western genre. The sheriff of Glass Key is corrupt and tells Elwood to get out of town, a local criminal bigwig demands a payment by noon, and the Overseas Highway becomes a waterbound version of the western main street, while Elwood himself comes from Montana, meaning his gaze is always attuned to frontier vistas. With that western sensibility comes a sensuous sense of space more generally, especially because Elwood’s nemeses, who want to forcibly purchase the road house, are attracted it it as the only building in the entirety of Glass Key that is sufficiently far from the road for illicit criminal activity and sufficiently close to easy deep water access too.

Those coordinates turn Road House into a kind of ocean western, most beautifully in a scene in which Ellie (Daniela Melchior), the daughter of the local sheriff, and Elwood’s almost-love interest, takes him to one of her favourite spots in the keys – a sandbank out in the middle of the ocean. As the couple set up deck chairs, beach umbrellas and a floating esky in one foot of water, the film’s perennial preoccupation with the connective tissue between ocean and highway blooms into a beautiful sense of liminality. As an ocean western, whose ultimate horizon is Key West, Road House is in part a tribute to the unique topography of the Keys – or rather, the way in which this mercurial landscape defies any stable sense of topography, collapsing sea, sky and line into a shimmering ambient haze. It’s against that haze, and its nascent guarantee of transfiguration, that the film’s propulsive action sequences are staged.

As in the original film these radiate out from the road house, although the public sphere has grown considerably more toxic, schizoid and volatile in contemporary America. Fights have simply become a part of the fabric of the road house, proprietor Frankie (Jessica Williams) informs Elwood, to the point where a protective net has been put up in front of the stage so that the musicians can continue playing when the inevitable fracas breaks out. Violence has been so normalised that it’s no longer eventful – it’s just business as usual for the bands who play through one punchup after another, and for the staff who have grown accustomed to stepping in (usually unsuccessfully) to break up a fray in between their normal bartending duties. Given that the road house is at the centre of the local community, this evokes a wider crisis in the American public sphere, one that turns the security guard into a latter-day descendent of the lone vigilante, as Elwood learns soon after taking on the position. Everyone in Glass Key instantly knows and values him, while his work immedatiately implants him in the community, partly by providing him with a houseboat residency affixed to the road house.

Although there are a distinct cadre of criminals in the film, they really only exist as embodiments of this more diffuse public sphere, which cries out for a renewed action cinema commensurate to its peculiar violence and volatility. Like The Iron Claw, Road House responds by envisaging an action cinema at the scale of UFC and rejuvenating action cinema by way of UFC. After all, UFC has supplanted the niche previously occupied by the action film – the male body in extremis – both in terms of intensity and camp, while making violence eventful in an American media culture where it is nearly always tragic, banal or both. In part, this is a product of the explosion of UFC in the peak social media era, whose platforms allow it to showcase its protagonists, antagonists, narratives, conflicts and flamboyant fashion statements as never before. Even with all that media infrastructure, however, UFC hasn’t quite managed to produce mise-en-scene in the traditional sense – and Road House provides the missing link in this respect, structuring its own narrative around the connective tissue between octagon and broader cinematic world. For it turns out that Elwood is haunted by the one and only time he absolutely lost it in the octagon, cementing his legacy and ending his UFC career with a display of excess bravura that maps onto our anticipation of him going full vigilante in his new role.

Of course, the most overt nod to UFC is the casting of Conor McGregor as Knox, a wrestler hired by Elwood’s nemeses to take control of the road house. Whereas Elwood is hired to maintain what residual public sphere remains, Knox sets himself upon destroying it in the most flamboyant way possible. We first meet him in an extended tracking-shot as he walks buck-naked through a market causing chaos at every turn, while he marks his entrance to the road house by directing attacking the net that separates the bar fights from the musicians, before setting his sights on the musicians themselves. In doing so, he destroys what little residue of a public sphere remains and reiterates this in the closing scene, which sees him heaving Elwood back through the tattered netting and onto the stage. The threshold between the stage and the road house thereby bleeds into the threshold between octagon and audience, while both become more porous as Gyllenhaal and McGregor confound the distinction between action cinema and UFC celebrity. To its credit too, Road House contains just enough McGregor – he does become a bit one-note – to make it clear that Liman is enlisting UFC in the service of action cinema, rather than vice versa. It’s a shame, then, that it never received the big-screen release that would have allowed it to conflate octagon and multiplex, but even then it’s a wonderful renewal of action cinema for contemporary America.