#Truth - "Road House Is Patrick Swayze's Finest Hour, And Also America's."

Via: "Road House has a persistent rep among assholes as a so-bad-it’s-good farce, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a film that recognizes and embraces its own absurdity...   It’s got a bar owner describing his own business as “the kind of place where they sweep the eyeballs up after closing.” It’s got one lead villain start a fight by barking, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison,” leading to countless “Is that badass? I guess that’s badass” middle-school debates."

 "Virtually every scene has at least one minor touch that will make you cackle with delight if you have any soul whatsoever. But it’s not a comedy; it’s a strange vision with its own sense of internal logic. It takes a deeply unlikely premise—the world’s best bouncer takes on a small-town criminal mob—and does it as well as anyone could possibly ever do it. It’s one of the greatest action movies ever made, no qualifiers necessary...

Consider, if you will, the scene where Swayze meets love interest Kelly Lynch, a dubiously hot small-town doctor. He checks into the hospital after finally getting a knife wound bad enough that he can’t sew it up himself; she starts out annoyed that she has to deal with this no-good bar-fighter, but she’s also fascinated with how someone with as calm a demeanor as Swayze can find himself getting so many knife wounds. She notes that his medical record claims that he earned a degree in philosophy from NYU, since this movie takes place in a world where your medical records also include every salient fact about you. And the brief conversation that follows allows Swayze to deliver two amazing, iconic lines: “Pain don’t hurt” and “Nobody ever wins a fight.” 

...With its deadpan tone and its constant zen aphorisms, Road House fuses the action movie and the art film just as completely as something like Le Samourai or Ghost Dog. It got credit for none of that. Instead, it earned itself a handful of Razzie nominations and a 40 percent on the Tomatometer, the sort of thing that makes me want to go back in time and slap 60 percent of movie critics and the entire Razzie nominating committee upside the head...  Road House deserves better. Let’s rescue it from ironist dickbags and remember it as the all-time classic it is."