Director Kathryn Bigelow’s crazy action romp from 1991 now gets a rerelease. Eric Hobsbawm might have called it the final moment of The Long Eighties Decade of Action Movies, with shootouts, PAEs (pointless action explosions) and a recurring prosthetic cameo for Ronald Reagan. Bigelow’s feminist achievement in showing she could make an action movie as well as any man was perhaps, but probably not, underscored by a brief scene in which leading man Keanu Reeves gets a savage beatdown from a naked young woman.
Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing. Straight-arrow rookie federal agent Johnny Utah, played by Reeves – inscrutable and husky-voiced as ever – is posted to LA, where he’s partnered-cute with an older and irascible officer. This is Pappas, played by Gary Busey, who brusquely remarks how Los Angeles has changed in the past 20 years. “The air got dirty and the sex got clean.” (This is a surfing movie and as such really has to be set on the west coast; we know what Robert Duvall’s surf enthusiast Lt Col Kilgore in Apocalypse Now thought about people from New Jersey who presumed to voice an opinion.)
The Bureau puts Utah and Pappas on to its most pressing case: a string of audacious bank robberies pulled off by the Ex-Presidents, four guys wearing the rubber-masked faces of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon B Johnson. The leader is inevitably Reagan, but all these guys in fact look like red-blooded red-state criminals. From the tan lines on their bodies visible on CCTV and the traces of surfboard wax that the forensic guys find at the crime scene, Utah and Pappas hilariously but correctly deduce that the criminals are surfers pulling off bankjobs to finance their addiction to surfing and other extreme sports. So Utah learns to surf, infiltrates the gang of charismatic surf-cult leader Bodhi (short for Bodhisattva), played by Patrick Swayze, and falls hard for Bodhi’s ex-girlfriend Tyler, played by Lori Petty.
The bank-robbery scenes and surfing scenes are so cleanly separated in the film that it is hard to make them match up in your mind. Bodhi and the guys aren’t ever shown scheming out the next bank raid on a table (with toy cars, etc) while in their swimwear in some beach hut with surfboards lying around. Their twin areas of expertise exist in two different worlds; the violence, tension and threat of bank robbery is a very different vibe from the dreamy ecstasy of riding the wave. The film tries to show that surfers can be feral and violent in their own way, defending their turf, but even this is a different kind of brutality. It is such a strange generic welding, and is part of what has made the film such an enduring cult gem.
As for Utah, he inevitably is suspected of going native in the surfers’ group and falling under Bodhi’s spell, but it is difficult to tell from Reeves’s stolid performance whether that is actually true. And does their bromance evolve into something else? Bodhi derisively jeers at Johnny: “I know you want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth!” (The first time I watched this, I misheard it as “like ass in your mouth”, which is just as potent as Roger Avary’s imaginary line in Top Gun about riding your tail.) Point Break has its own kind of romance.
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