Road House, Doug Liman's new take on the beloved classic of the same name, shares a great deal of DNA with the original. The underlying template – a lone wanderer blows into town to clean up a rowdy bar, strikes up a relationship with a doctor, and goes up against a vicious enemy – remains the same, but there are some key changes from the original that mark the Prime Video version as different.
Patrick Swayze played 'cooler' (AKA bouncer) Dalton in the '89 original film, and, this time, Jake Gyllenhaal is stepping in to play the role. Gyllenhaal and Swayze, who were co-stars in Donnie Darko, portray two very different incarnations of Dalton – though, as Gyllenhaal tells us, there is still some overlap.
"There's an essential part of Dalton that I loved," Gyllenhaal says. "And it was definitely a characteristic, a personality trait, that Patrick had in spades, which is this sort of quiet patience. What I love about the original Dalton, and also this one, is that, the Dalton that I play, has a bit of more absurd humor to him. His observations are always a bit wry. But there's a real power in his stillness, and I definitely brought that from Patrick's interpretation."
Similarly, Daniela Melchior plays a fresh incarnation of a character from the original, though with more changes made to her character than to Dalton. Melchior is Ellie in the 2024 Road House, who is loosely based on Kelly Lynch's Dr. Elizabeth in the '89 movie. Like Elizabeth, Ellie also embarks on a romance with Dalton.
"Since I read the script, I noticed that Ellie would be totally different than Elizabeth," Melchior tells us. "She was just a badass. And I noticed right away that they wouldn't go as a common or a conventional couple go on any other movie. And it made sense to me, because it's fresh, it's real, it's way more relatable to nowadays.
"And definitely working in the [Dominican Republic], surrounded by Dominican girls, I feel that I also, in the moment, took a bit of that warm blood from the Latinas a little bit to Ellie," she continues. "She's definitely unapologetic. I took a bit of the location itself to the character."
Then there's Billy Magnussen's Ben Brandt, a delightful villain who fulfils a similar role in the story as Ben Gazzara's Brad Wesley. Magnussen, though, doesn't want to weigh the films against each other. "It was its own character. I don't want to compare the past film with the modern day film, because I don't think entertainment should be competitive," he says. "It shouldn't. You can't compare it; a piece of art is a piece of art. Let it be what it is.
"Doug Liman invited me into this film, and I just wanted to create a character that was the bad guy," he adds. "You want to hate this guy. So that's what I tried to do."
Road House is available on Prime Video from 21 March. You can fill out your watchlist with our guide to the year's most exciting upcoming movie release dates.
Keep your eyes peeled for more on Road House on 12DOVE and the Inside Total Film Podcast soon, and see what Magnussen had to say about the live-action Lilo & Stitch through the link.
