Director: Scott Ziehl
Writer: Miles Chapman
Starring: Johnathan Schaech (Prom Night, Doom Generation, That Thing You Do!); Jake Busey (Tomcats, Starship Troopers); Ellen Hollman (lots of T.V.); Will Patton (Armageddon, The Punisher)
IMDB User Rating: 4.4 out of 10 stars.
Favorite Line: "Hey, you're Dalton's kid...I heard all about you. I thought you'd be bigger."
Favorite scene: Jake Busey's character dies when he falls on a wooden pelican statue...poetic justice, given the plot.
Sometimes you have to break from the norm, especially when zombies, werewolves and vampires are all starting to cross over and blend together. And when you see a straight to DVD sequel like Roadhouse 2: Last Call come across your cable listing...you gotta watch it. Well, you don't--but I did. Given the fact that I had just come down off a pretty decent experience with a Johnathan Schaech character (Prom Night), and Jake Busey-like his dad-never fails to make me laugh, I couldn't pass this one up. The fact that it was a sequel to one of the shittiest (but fun to watch) movies of all time, it was doomed from the start. The dice were rolled...and I crapped out.
Roadhouse 2 is every bit as good as Starship Troopers 3. It opens very much like Roadhouse does, in a rowdy roadhouse called the Black Pelican, with the same redneck assholes causing the same redneck trouble. But in this one, the owner (Will Patton) is a bad-ass named Nate Tanner (Dalton's brother) who cleans out the riff-raff quite nicely by himself. But local drug lord Wild Bill (Jake Busey) needs the Pelican for its prime location (that's the only reason given...the whole movie is very vague), and will do anything to get it--including fighting dirty with Nate (some Asian chick throws a couple of knives at Nate, putting him in the hospital).
Johnathan Schaech is an undercover DEA agent who goes into a strip club and pulls the WORST drug deal EVER! He gets a call about his Uncle Nate (turns out he's Dalton's kid, he left Louisiana after Dalton was murdered) being in the hospital, and immediately goes AWOL from the DEA to run the Pelican...but wait! The twist is that there's the underlying issue of "the big one" that he owes his Captain, and going down to Louisiana just might be it..."You gotta trust me on this one".
And that's the plot. Simple as that--except I forgot about the Miami drug kingpin that Busey works for who gets pissed off and comes to Louisiana: "You live in a swamp, you know that?" he says to Busey...umm...what do you call Florida? The highlands? And then there's the girl that Schaech falls for, who just so happens to be Busey's cousin.
There are really no high points...the fight scenes would be pretty good if they weren't so horribly overdone and cartoonish. There are a couple of hot girls, and like one nude scene, and swamp boats, of which I'm a fan.
The throwbacks to the first one are a-plenty: Schaech not only drives a Mercedes-Benz just like his daddy, he uses it just like Swayze did in the first one: as an unmanned battering ram. Busey drives like an asshole in his first encounter with Schaech (just like Ben Gazarra). The bouncer rules are the same: "Take it outside, and be nice...until it's time to not be nice". And even though Johnathan Schaech is taller than most people around him, they all say that corny "I thought you'd be bigger" line.
The low points: The bar's relevance--other than location--to drug trafficking is never really explained. Schaech calls a DEA friend of his, and a whole crew of agents come down to Louisiana from New York to try to bust Busey, but he gets away on his swamp boat, and they pretty much shrug and split. Really? You're gonna give it just one day? The main female character, Beau (Ellen Hollman) confesses to being in the Army, ("two tours in Iraq") when it's apparent she knows her way around weapons, although the stuff she knows she definitely didn't learn in the Army. Perhaps most insulting of all is how many times Uncle Nate basically gets killed but doesn't die...he suffers no less than TWO fatal wounds, and is up and running around behind the bar by the end scene of the flick.
The ending is weak: Busey and Schaech fight in the bar, which is horribly lit, and that detracts from the fight itself (maybe they had to light it that way because Busey can't fight, and he got really fat. Simultaneously, there's a chick fight between Beau and the knife-throwing Asian chick (who keeps opening her butterfly knife for some reason). But where most chick fights are pretty good...this one sucks...it's no Two Days in the Valley, that's for sure.
I'm gonna go back to the zombies, werewolves, vampires and serial killer movies. At least for now. It did feel good to broaden my horizons a little, though. I still don't recommend you waste your time on this flick.
Have a laugh: check out the trailer: Roadhouse 2: Last Call
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