Under the Spotlight: Conor McGregor’s breathtaking inability to play himself in ‘Road House’
Dwayne Johnson, Dave Bautista, and John Cena have shown that parlaying the theatrical nature of professional wrestling into a successful and lucrative acting career is a viable proposition for anyone who dreams of swapping the squared circle for the silver screen, but Conor McGregor’s movie debut in Road House hints that mixed martial arts won’t create a comparable pipeline.
In Doug Liman’s remake of the Patrick Swayze cult favourite, McGregor isn’t asked to do anything more than play himself, and he still can’t do it. He plays the part of Knox, an overconfident, cocky, and brutish Irishman with a penchant for doling out beatings, which on paper should be right up his street. Instead, he’s so laughably terrible that he makes Randy Couture look like Marlon Brando by comparison.
There was plenty of hype when ‘Notorious’ was first announced for the ensemble, given his crossover appeal and name recognition that could realistically convince a brand new demographic to check out the unnecessary Jake Gyllenhaal-led redux of an original so cheesy it could decimate the lactose intolerant population single-handedly, which seems to be the entire reason for his involvement.
McGregor was quick to fire a shot at the aforementioned Johnson as a result, celebrating the fact Road House had made him the highest-paid first-time actor in history. ‘The Rock’ netted a cool $5.5 million for The Mummy Returns in 2001, so Amazon MGM Studios was clearly betting big on the UFC brawler’s popularity, bringing in the crowds. Except, much to Liman’s chagrin, the film was released exclusively on streaming to render the investment as pointless as it was expensive.
Musclebound henchmen with a glint of madness in their eye have been a staple of action cinema for decades, and it doesn’t come across as the trickiest thing to pull off when the cameras are rolling. After all, it was McGregor’s brash, trash-talking, and outspoken persona that had made him one of the UFC’s biggest names to begin with, but in Road House, he ends up swaggering around from scene to scene without displaying an ounce of the charisma or presence that made him such a headline-grabber.
Road House literally requires nothing more of him than to saunter into a scene every now and again, say things like “looks I fucked up your leg” and “sounds good to me”, before punching people in various parts of their body. It was never going to trouble the Academy Awards or have Martin Scorsese banging down his door, but McGregor nonetheless decides the perfect amount of gravitas to bring to the part of Knox is the same levels found in a nativity play performed by schoolchildren. Anyone who thinks people playing themselves is easy needs to look no further than Road House for proof of the contrary because McGregor displays an awe-inspiring inability to do it.
Presumably, the instructions from director Liman were for him to do whatever he does off-camera and bring that to his performance. Instead, he’s so stilted that he gives off the distinct impression he’d probably ruined multiple takes by staring straight down the lens by accident. He’s hamming it up for the cheap seats for what seems to be the amusement of nobody other than himself, acting as though what the world really needed to see was a pointless remake of a perfectly acceptable B-tier actioner being dragged down by a guy who seems to have decided panto was the perfect point of reference for how broad to be. It was no doubt fun for him to make, but that hardly manifests on-screen.
Does he at least acquit himself well in the fight scenes? Sure, but that was the bare minimum required, and even at that, the CGI and camerawork can often be dizzying and distracting to the point of being incomprehensible. When asked by TalkSport if he saw the bright lights of Hollywood in his future, McGregor answered in the negative. “For me, it’s no, there’s no more movies for me,” he said, a blessing in disguise for the art of cinema after a debutant who made their name as an arrogant fighter happy to run their mouth couldn’t even be remotely convincing in Road House as an arrogant fighter happy to run their mouth.
