NIGHTBRAWLER

Imagine that you're a bouncer in a scuzzy small-town bar where some of the world's nastiest drunks go at one another with fists, knives, and broken beer bottles and that's on a good night.

- JUSTIN CHANG

Forced to risk life and limb intervening in non-stop flareups of physical violence, what do you do? A better question: What would Patrick Swayze do?

The movie is "Road House," a critically mauled, cult-reclaimed smash-'em-up from 1989, and Swayze, as Dalton, the bar's newly hired cooler, offers a handy crash course in the art of de-escalation. "One, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected," he says.

"Two, take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary. And, three, be nice." Sound advice, and, until the time comes for him to rip out an assailant's throat, Dalton heeds it scrupulously.

He minds his manners, underestimates (almost) no one, and takes to the outdoors like a Zen monk, his oil-slicked torso catching the sunlight just so during Tai Chi practice. But not every Swayze character is oily in such a desirable way. In the eerie Reaganite suburbia of "Donnie Darko" (2001), an even darker vision of the nineteen-eighties, we find Swayze as Jim Cunningham, a smooth motivational speaker with a bad case of soul rot. In lieu of selfdefense tips, he offers useless self-help platitudes: "Son, violence is a product of fear. Learn to truly love yourself."

No wonder it's so satisfying when the troubled young Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) steps up to the mike and lets this charlatan have it: "I think you're the fucking Antichrist."