Jimmy blows up Emmett’s house. Dalton knocks Jimmy off his motorcycle. Jimmy and Dalton fight. Dalton gets the upper hand. Jimmy pulls out a gun. Dalton kicks the gun out of Jimmy’s hand as he fires. Dalton tears Jimmy’s throat out. Dalton kicks Jimmy’s still-standing corpse into the water.
That, in broad strokes, is the beach fight scene. But this simple recitation of facts does not do justice to the magnificence of the throat rip, one of the great cinematic acts of violence of the past thirty years.
Until this point, fights in Road House always go a certain way. Some goons show up and pick a fight, and they exchange blows with Dalton and his men until they have been hit in the head, gut, or legs so many times they can no longer fight. It’s time consuming, and messy, and involves a lot of back and forth.
Dalton and Jimmy’s fight was already an escalation of this pattern insofar as the combatants are so much more talented at violence than the bulk of Dalton’s opponents. In Jimmy he met his match, or something very near to it. These kicks and punches had something serious behind them, even if Dalton seemed barely able to suppress a laugh at one point. These are precisely targeted strikes. It’s not a matter of Tinker nearly getting lucky with a knife—everything Jimmy does is meant to maim and kill.
But the throat rip is something singular, something special. It is the purest encapsulation of The Time to Not Be Nice. Faced with an opponent willing to violate the sacred spirit of hand-to-hand combat in order to settle matters with a gun, Dalton unleashes his own lethal weapon: his bare hand. A chop, a grip, a pull, and no more Jimmy. It’s as simple as pulling a trigger.
But in keeping with Dalton’s mien as a man who bridges the natural and unnatural worlds, it’s messier than a gun. It’s like digging your hands in the cool earth and uprooting a weed. Dalton grasps the violence in Jimmy and pulls it out of his neck, and behold, there’s no Jimmy left inside there anymore, no Jimmy at all.
