Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s “Asphalt City” purports to concern the lives of emergency medical technicians on the streets of New York City, but it’s really about movies like “The French Connection.” It’s about machismo and the danger and tedium of public services work, and how all we ultimately have in this rotten, crummy world is our ability to tell The Man where he can get off. There are flashes of empathy, but they can’t compete with the lurid set pieces. I probably would’ve loved this dull, violent, grindingly repetitive and obvious movie as a teenager because I would’ve taken it on its desired terms: as a breath of fresh and clarifying air. All I see at age 44 are the clichés and the generalizations and the flashes of “style that suggest less torment than ice cream headache.
It has the set-up of a buddy cop movie. Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan) is the rookie and Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn) the hardened, battered warrior of the streets. They meet in the opening scenes as Ollie is trying to perform a tracheotomy on a shooting victim that they managed to drag into an ambulance. The victim is a criminal, and the nearby cops don’t even bother with a pretense of valuing his life — and that bitterness is the driving force of “Asphalt City.” The seeming futility of the task at hand, coupled with a lack of gratitude and inadequate resources, are familiar frustrations of people in public service that can lead to alienation and a calcifying of human feeling. That is a worthy subject for exploration precisely for its element of blasphemy.
The dangerousness of “Asphalt City” has less to do with its violence than with its wrestling over its own sympathies. It flirts with endorsing the cops’ reactionary values, particularly in a climactic, melodramatic bit of business with Gene. I don’t think it ultimately lands on bitterness that profound, but Sauvaire is certainly willing to glimpse over into the abyss of nihilism. If only his grappling with nihilism and faith weren’t so literal-minded. For a serious exploration of an ambulance driver’s potential loss of faith, see Martin Scorsese’s underrated, hallucinatory “Bringing Out the Dead,” to which “Asphalt City” owes much.
Like all rookies in movies, Ollie has greater ambitions, to be a doctor, which is to say that he’s coded as a white-collar guy disguised among the blue-collar roughnecks. Like all veterans in movies, Gene is the man who lives by simpler rules. He may not be by the book, but damn it he knows human nature. Once this contrast is established, and the opening scenes sell it immediately, “Asphalt City” doesn’t have anywhere else to go. It doesn’t have a plot. It’s one garish episode after another, all rich in jittery camera movements and horror-movie imagery: spilled guts, black flies, corpses, drug needles, and the suffocation of NYC’s own geometry as it’s depicted here. It’s always night and there’s little natural life. The film’s title isn’t selling a false bill of goods.
Sheridan is as bland as most rookie characters are. He doesn’t overplay Ollie’s naiveté, which is refreshing, but it’s a thankless role that exists to prop up the character that has been tailor-made for a famous actor. As in most rookie-veteran set-ups, the situation between the characters serves as a parallel of the one existing between the actors. Sheridan is an up-and-comer—maybe, he’s been stuck in that mode for a long time now—and Penn is of course the lionized pro with an enormous reputation.
Penn is quietly extraordinary here, and his performance is the only reason I’m hesitant to advise that you skip “Asphalt City” outright. His terse physical work underscores the ache that’s running underneath Gene’s cynical bravado. This is the kind of potent minimalism that a great actor who’s been well-toasted in his career can often grow into. Penn knows that he has authority and that a little of it says a lot. He shows more control here than he has in better and more celebrated films, in fact. Penn is certainly more even-handed here than he was in his memorable yet all-over-the-place Oscar-winning performance in “Mystic River.”
Penn’s casual mastery in “Asphalt City” is a marked contrast from whatever Jake Gyllenhaal is doing in Doug Liman’s “Road House,” this month’s misbegotten remake of a cult classic from a now-alien age. Rowdy Harrington’s 1989 “Road House” has gained a favorable reputation over the years, earning the kind of goodwill that comes from the internet, where everyone discovers that their guilty pleasure is everyone else’s as well.
I hate the term guilty pleasure, which suggests that you’re a lesser person if you aren’t spending your evenings, say, contemplating Foucault and watching Ingmar Bergman movies. There’s no need to feel guilty about Harrington’s “Road House,” it is disreputable and enjoyable for that very reason. A piece of vigilante redneck kitsch, it traffics in funny, colorful dialogue that is wildly unquotable here, and it has a certain lack of self-consciousness that was common in the days when hair metal ruled the airwaves. The old “Road House” has the feeling of hearing barroom stories that are only permissible to be heard in said barroom, and modern blockbuster cinema, with its platitudinous corporate blandness and overcompensating aura of self-importance, simply doesn’t understand 1980s-era shamelessness.
This is all germane to Gyllenhaal’s performance in the Liman remake, I promise. As the 2024-era version of Patrick Swayze’s legendary bouncer, Gyllenhaal recognizes that he should be at least trying for some of the unpretentious comedy of the original movie. His bouncer, who is now charged with bouncing in the Florida Keys rather than the Missouri juke joint of the first movie, is meant to be kooky and ironically thoughtful. He will break your arm, but he will first ask about the location of the closest hospital. Vaguely funny in theory, but you need an actor who’s confident enough to throw that kind of punchline away. One of Swayze’s great gifts was his willingness to play utterly absurd material dead straight, somehow without looking foolish. By contrast, Gyllenhaal underlines such jokes in magic marker.
Apart from his commanding work in Michael Bay’s unexpectedly first-rate “Ambulance,” Gyllenhaal has been in a weird place as an actor for a while. He first established himself as a remarkable naturalist in films like “Donnie Darko” and “Zodiac,” but at some point he decided that he was a stylist, a kind of hipster Gary Oldman-style technician, and the role doesn’t fit him. This bouncer is a talented, uncertain actor’s essay on a dated action hero type, and if that sounds appealing then this “Road House” may work for you.
Liman, a solid studio journeyman who occasionally does lively work, such as most of “Edge of Tomorrow,” keeps things moving. This “Road House” is action-heavy and violent, with none of the one-liners and ludicrous character stuff for which the Swayze original is remembered fondly. People will watch at least part of it because of the title and then re-watch the original, which is also streaming on Amazon. New “Road House” is serving its purpose then: as filler that’s an advertisement for you to revisit what you really want. The corporate nostalgia age in a nutshell, and “Asphalt City,” which is glorified Friedkin/Scorsese cosplay, isn’t entirely above this syndrome either.
“Asphalt City” is now in theaters, while “Road House” is now streaming on Amazon.
