From missing characters to omitted plot points, the 2024 Road House remake leaves out a lot of details from the original movie. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Dalton, Road House (2024) is a re-imagining of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie of the same name. Although the remake borrows the same basic premise of a bouncer hired to tame a rowdy roadhouse and preserves several core elements of the original, Road House 2024 is also different from the 1989 movie in many ways.
Certain details were altered from the original, such as naming the bar after the movie title instead of “The Double Deuce” and moving the location of 2024’s Road House remake from Jasper, Missouri to the Florida Keys. Some of these changes made the 2024 Road House remake even better than the original movie, while others caused omissions from the original. Some of these exclusions didn’t change the story all that much in the remake but were still noticeable when compared to the original movie.
By the time the original Road House movie begins, Dalton has already made a name for himself as a no-nonsense cooler, a type of bouncer whose job is to break up bar fights by de-escalating or “cooling down” the tension. When Frank Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) makes Dalton an offer to work at the Double Deuce at the beginning of the movie, Dalton is working as a cooler in a bar called the Band Stand in New York. His notorious reputation, which includes the time he killed a man in self-defense in Memphis, even follows him to the Double Deuce.
However, Dalton’s backstory in the 2024 Road House remake is completely different. As opposed to a career cooler like the original character, the remake’s Dalton is a former UFC fighter who lost his cool in the ring and ended up killing his opponent. When Frankie (Jessica Williams) approaches Dalton, he is making a living as a cage fighter on the underground circuit. Not only has Dalton never worked as a cooler before in the remake, but the term “cooler” is never even used to refer to his role at the bar.
Another one of the biggest ways Dalton is different in the 2024 and 1989 Road House movies is that in the original Road House, Dalton has a PhD in philosophy from NYU. Rather than pursuing a particular discipline, he was more generally interested in exploring “man’s search for faith.” Dalton’s philosophical studies serve as a character-building tool that inform his perspective on fighting as a necessary evil to maintain order as a cooler. This is reflected in his stance that “nobody ever wins a fight” and his third rule for the Double Deuce staff: “be nice.”
In the Road House remake, Dalton’s peacekeeping principles are a newfound development that stem from his guilt about killing his opponent. He learned that “nobody wins a fight” the hard way from experience, as his inability to control his temper and rage had fatal consequences. Dalton’s philosophical background is not entirely responsible for informing his outlook on violence in the original, but since Dalton changed from being a professional cooler to a former UFC fighter-turned-bouncer, a PhD in philosophy no longer fit with the character’s backstory in the remake, so it was omitted altogether.
In the original Road House, Dalton is always getting comments about his size because he has a pretty small build for a bouncer (Swayze was 5’10 and very lean in the movie). From strangers to friends to foes to lovers, everyone tells Dalton they “thought he’d be bigger” given his line of work. He may not be a big brawny bouncer, but his ability to take down men twice his size is part of Dalton’s mystique and charm in the original movie.
This theme of everyone telling Dalton he’s not as big as they thought is completely absent in the Road House remake. Although Gyllenhaal is taller than Swayze at 6’0, nobody would expect Dalton to be any bigger in the remake because he doesn’t have a reputation as an exceptionally good cooler. In fact, it’s common knowledge that Dalton was a UFC middleweight fighter, who are between 171 and 185 pounds, and Gyllenhaal had dropped to 184 pounds by the end of his training for Road House 2024.
When Dalton first shows up in the original Road House, the viewer is introduced to many of the employees at the Double Deuce, including waitresses, bartenders, and ordinary bouncers. In his new role as the bar’s cooler, Dalton mentors the bouncers who have felt overwhelmed and outnumbered by all the rowdy patrons. Although several members of the Double Deuce staff get fired early on,there are still more established characters working at the bar in the original Road House than at any point in the remake.
Many employees can be seen working at the Road House bar, but only a few of them are actual characters in the 2024 Road House remake, and none of them are official bouncers until Dalton shows up. Billy (Lukas Gage) the bartender steps in to help and tries his best to scare off the instigators, but he frequently gets beat up because he’s not actually a bouncer. Just like in the original, Dalton starts mentoring Billy and even recruits Reef (Dominique Columbus) from the beach stand to assist him, but neither of them were already working as bouncers when Dalton arrived.
In the original Road House, Dalton only agrees to take Frank’s offer if he gets to “run the show completely,” which includes having the authority to fire employees. Right away, Dalton fires a bouncer named Morgan (Terry Funk) for not having “the right temperament for the trade,” and a waitress named Judy (Sheila Ryan) for dealing drugs out of the bar. During his first shift, he fires another bouncer named Steve (Gary Hudson) for having a quickie in the supply room on his break and a bartender named Pat McGurn (John Doe) for stealing.
However, in the Road House remake, Dalton is not given the same authority since he doesn’t ask to have any control over the bar operations, including the staff. There are no issues with existing employees that would require intervention from him or Frankie anyway, but he wouldn’t have the power to fire anyone from the Road House even if he wanted to.
In the original Road House movie, Frank hires Dalton as part of an initiative to revamp the Double Deuce and turn it into a nicer, more respectable establishment. Once Dalton starts working his magic by weeding out the weak links in the staff and teaching the bouncers how to properly handle unruly patrons, the Double Deuce gets a full makeover. The employees all wear official uniforms, the chain-link fence is removed from the front of the stage, and the interior is upgraded.
In the Road House remake, Frankie only hires Dalton to help her restore the bar’s welcoming atmosphere by fending off Brandt’s goons and preventing further damage. The Road House is already nicer than the Double Deuce initially was anyways, so it isn’t in desparate need of a makeover, Of course, Road House 2024’s ending leaves the bar in ruins, so Frankie will have to do some remodeling anyway, but during the movie, its appearance doesn’t change.
One of the major subplots in the original Road House is Dalton’s budding romance with Dr. Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch). Dalton first meets Elizabeth, who is given the nickname “Doc” by Dalton’s friend Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), when she’s attending to his wounds at the hospital. They show mutual interest in one another and start spending more time together, which eventually develops into a relationship. When Dalton refuses to back down from Wesley, Elizabeth appears to have given up on him, but Road House 1989’s ending shows them skinny-dipping in the lake together, indicating that they end up together.
However, Dalton’s romantic storyline is not nearly as prominent in the Road House remake. Although Elizabeth has a character replacement in Road House 2024 named Ellie (Daniela Melchior), she and Dalton aren’t “endgame,” nor do they ever really become a couple to begin with. It’s clear they care about each other, but they don’t actually spend much time together after making out at the end of their first date on the beach halfway through the movie. Although they might’ve officially gotten together had things gone differently, because Dalton leaves town, their flirtation was never able to develop into anything more.
The main villain in the original Road House is Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), an older, wealthy man who goes to great lengths to remind the townspeople he built a lot of Jasper. After Dalton and Elizabeth get together, it is revealed that Wesley once “had a thing” for Elizabeth and “went nuts” when she left town, although she doesn’t seem to have ever returned the feeling. Dalton getting involved with Elizabeth only fuelled the fire of Wesley’s disdain for him and drove him to go after Dalton and his allies even harder.
In the Road House remake, Wesley’s role is split into two characters: Gerald Brandt and his son, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen). Since Gerald is in prison for unknown crimes (though it’s implied they’re drug-related), Ben serves as his mouthpiece, instructing his henchmen to do his family’s dirty work by going after the Road House. However, neither Ben nor Gerald ever had any romantic interest in Ellie. Ellie does have a cop ex-boyfriend whose boat she often borrows (and Dalton later steals), but he’s a pretty inconsequential character who does not interfere with Ellie and Dalton at all.
In the original Road House movie, Dalton allegedly killed the man in Memphis by ripping his throat out, which is the same way he eventually kills Wesley’s right-hand man, Jimmy Reno (Marshall Teague). In the Road House remake, Jimmy’s role is occupied by Knox (Conor McGregor), an enforcer whom Gerald calls on to finish the job after getting word behind bars that Ben was proving to not be up for the task. Dalton seemingly stabs Knox to death at the end of the movie, but the post-credits scene in Road House 2024 reveals that Knox survived.
Since the fate of Jimmy’s counterpart was changed to have Knox survive, the 2024 Road House remake couldn’t have recreated Dalton’s throat-ripping fight scene. There are still plenty of ridiculous deaths in the 2024 Road House remake, but nobody gets their throat ripped out. However, there is an Easter egg in 2024’s Road House that references this particular method of killing from the original movie, when Gyllenhaal’s Dalton fatally punches another one of Brandt’s henchmen, Vince (Beau Knapp), in the throat.