Viking Night: Point Break
By Bruce Hall
June 2, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Of course that bastard James Cameron was involved somehow. First, he stole my idea about naked, verbally challenged robots enslaving humanity. Then, his wife beat me to the punch and made a movie about Ted’s Excellent Adventure fighting crime on a surfboard.
And that film was called...Point Break.
Wow, was it really that long ago? I mean, so much has changed since 1991. Nobody could decide whether Keanu was talented or not. Lori Petty is reportedly nutty as a Snickers bar. Gary Busey might not be human. Patrick Swayze...well...okay. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and some things are eternal. Dead or alive, Swayze is as Swayze does. So speaking of the dead, someone decided to resurrect Point Break. If you’re like me, and believe everything you read on the Internet, this has apparently caused a lot of people a lot of sleepless nights. There are more than a few people on earth who are into Point Break the way some people are into Star Wars. Sad?
Well…a little. I like Star Wars, but the chain came off my bike the other day, and that upset me a lot more than Jar-Jar Binks did. Still, people like what people like, and Swayze is as Swayze does. So what’s the big deal with Point Break? Keanu. Busey. Swayze. Surfing. Extreme sports laced with proto-Zen underpinnings.
How could you NOT be obsessed with that?
The story is simple. Southern California is rocked by a string of bank robberies, courtesy of a gang calling themselves the “Ex-Presidents.” They wear rubber masks bearing the likeness of - at the time - the previous four American presidents, and knock over the Golden State’s most prestigious financial institutions - in character. It’s really kind of amusing. As the film opens, they’ve struck almost two dozen times, somehow never hurting anyone in the process and each time getting away clean. Enter Special Agent Johnny Utah, former college football star turned undercover FBI agent.
Yeah, that’s right. Sonny Crockett wasn’t answering his phone, so the FBI hired the second most recognizable deep cover agent of all time. Utah is a tenacious overachiever who succeeds at everything he does, having abandoned football only due to a knee injury. He's paired with Angelo Pappas, an eccentric, cynical veteran of both police work and, of course, Vietnam. Pappas has been tracking the Ex-Presidents for years but has all but given up, both because it's hard, and because he's lacked an appropriately hunky sidekick to motivate his competitive spirit.
Pappas believes his suspects to secretly be surfers, because...obviously. And he’s so sure about it that nobody - including himself - has bothered to follow up on it despite 20 plus robberies (that seems kind of stupid, but what do I know about police work?) So against orders, the two of them investigate. This leads Utah almost immediately to a brooding drifter named Tyler, who agrees to teach Johnny to surf. She almost immediately leads him to a close-knit group of philosophical iconoclasts slash beach bums, led by a charismatic surf-god named Bodhi. Bodhi and his friends are "live for the moment" types who see surfing not as a sport, but as a way to embrace chaos by becoming a part of it.
So, he almost immediately takes a liking to Johnny, drawn by a mutual love of football AND pushing boundaries for the sake of self-exploration. Yes, it's all very convenient, isn’t it? Like most movie cops, Johnny and Pappas don’t investigate crimes so much as they stumble across the obvious clues the screenwriter laid out in front of them. But it makes for highly economic storytelling, and the real story here is that Johnny quite the obedient drone his personnel file suggests. He always wins because he follows the rules, and he outworks his competition. But when that’s not enough, it begins to awaken a rebellious streak within him, and Bodhi is drawn to it like white on rice.
And that’s really the heart of the movie. It’s no secret that Bodhi and his boys are the antagonists here, but it’s the ways in which he and Johnny interact and affect one another that drives the story forward. Like a lot of people who are happy with themselves, Bodhi and his friends preach a lot about life philosophy, and how to get what you need from the universe. I wouldn’t put too much stock into that, though. Their worldview more or less amounts to “when following the rules becomes inconvenient, act out!” That’s okay when you’re a toddler, but that’s the sort of self-destructive behavior most parents spend the first 18 years of your life trying to get under control.
But in case you didn’t know, Swayze is as Swayze does - pick any character he’s ever played and put him on a surfboard. You’re either going to be into it or you aren’t.
What’s interesting is that while there’s a part of this that Johnny can understand all this, a life of discipline - in sports and law enforcement - has taught him to temper impulse with judgment - it’s why he’s the only one who gets along with Pappas. So while the struggle he faces as he begins to identify with Bodhi isn’t exactly original (a deep cover operative who starts to lose track of where one identity begins and the other ends? Say it isn’t so!), it’s a compelling crisis of conscience that puts meat on the bones of what would otherwise be a largely forgettable film. It requires Keanu to play complementary roles, and it actually suits his talent for...let's call it “subtlety”...quite well.
I think we all know where Kathryn Bigelow ended up, but she spent her early career breathing her distinctive brand of earthy intellectualism into films that might have felt lighter otherwise (Blue Steel, Strange Days). Yes, there’s a lot of stupid dialogue. Yes, the major plot points are all pretty obvious. Yes, Pappas and Utah are terrible detectives and they work at a version of the FBI that resembles a frat house more than a law enforcement agency. And did you know Pappas was in Vietnam? And that he was scarred by his experiences? You didn’t? That’s weird because it gets mentioned about 18 times. And every cop movie made between 1971 and 1995 has That Guy. Despite all the cheese, and despite the cliché, Bigelow makes it work - and the Keanu/Busey/Swayze triumvirate makes it fun. And tell me - watch this movie and tell me - does that ending rule, or what?
Answer: It does.
So if you’ve spent the last two weeks on the internet with your caps lock on, let me offer you some advice. Don’t get upset about the Point Break remake. It’ll either be better than the original, or it won’t. If it is, then you have something to add to your video collection. If it’s not, then I guess the 14 days you spent hyperventilating and getting yourself added to the terrorist watch list was worth it.