isreputability is tragically undervalued in modern movies. Streaming has virtually erased the concept, and the allure, of the “straight-to-video” release. Cheap, sensationalistic films are still being made, but they’re more likely to be appreciated only by niche audiences. There’s no such thing as a mainstream B movie—made truly with just a few nickels and not backed by a cool, name-brand studio—that hungry moviegoers, en masse, will trek out to see.
But it’s been replaced by something else, maybe even something greater: he’s one of the most casually soulful actors we’ve got. Inhis timing is as dry as a sun-bleached pebble. When Ellie, after he’s deposited those thugs in her ER, calls him a “rage-filled dickhead,” he repeats the wordas if it were the sweetest compliment—he’s almost dazed that this firecracker of a woman is paying him any mind at all.
Gyllenhaal’s face is more angular now, more chiseled. His features—the resolute jawline, those eyebrows like two thick slashes, that set of enormous anime-character eyes—haven’t slackened or softened. They’ve only become more definitive, more insistent. Gyllenhaal and Swayze were friends, and his performance here honors Swayze's without in any way parroting it, in a movie that’s a model of what a remake can be.