“Relax, relax!” says Brad Wesley at the precise midpoint of the film Road House—57:02 down, 57:02 to go. He’s telling his guest, Dalton, to chill out about the whole “this guy just sent his goons to pick me up and paraded me past his abused girlfriend so he could sit me down in his breakfast nook and tell me he thinks I murdered a man in cold blood” thing. I’d probably tell him to relax too, if I saw him getting up from his chair in anger and believed him to be a remorseless killing machine!
After Dalton gets up, fuming, Wesley does his RELAX, DON’T DO IT bit and then asks, purely hypothetically of course, how much money it would take to get Dalton to come work for him if he had a bar that needed cleaning up.
“There’s no amount of money,” Dalton says, and storms out.
And I will say this for Road House: The midpoint of the movie—the turning point, if you will—really is the midpoint of the movie.
This scene is where it stops being a job and becomes something personal. This scene is where it stops being time to be nice and starts being time to not be nice. This scene is where Dalton starts to break his own Three Simple Rules. This scene is where the Dalton Path diverges in a breakfast nook and Dalton begins to take the one less traveled by, perhaps because it is littered with corpses. Relax? Don’t do it.
Tags: brad welsey, dalton, dream those dreams, gotta hit me, hit me, hit me with those laser beams, make making it your intention, road house, scheme those schemes, so shoot it in the right direction