POINT BREAK Review: So Wonderfully, Amazingly Stupid
“I believe that, like me, the people behind these robberies are extreme athletes.”
Everyone who has something to say about the Point Break remake will inevitably quote this line from the trailer. And with good reason. You can’t do much better when it comes to communicating the film’s rampant stupidity, though I would like to illustrate the scope of that stupidity by adding the “ancient proverb” that kicks off that trailer:
“There are some who do not fear death for they are more afraid of not really living.”
Now you know. You don’t get the full effect of Point Break’s idiocy if you don’t include the bro’d-down bullshit mysticism it peddles.
This is one of those movies where absolutely everything about its characters and dialog is asinine. Its brainlessness seems sincere, but since it’s trying hard to ape the Fast and Furious franchise (which itself started by aping Point Break), it’s hard to tell where the real stupidity ends and the possibly brilliant, if empty, affectation begins.
Which means at the end of the day, we don’t quite have a new bad movie classic on our hands. Anyone who watches this movie drunk with a bunch of goofballs looking for fun will likely have a good time. Those of us waiting for a new weird masterpiece will be disappointed. Point Break is bad, and Point Break is dumb. But without the presence of a few BYOB ingredients to help it along, Point Break is not bad or dumb enough to be hilarious.
The plot this time revolves around ex-extreme sporter, Johnny Utah (Utah is actually just his nickname). Johnny Utah wants to join the FBI. Seven years earlier, he quit extreme sporting when a pal of his somehow managed to die while ramping from mountain to mountain on a dirt bike. During Utah's kind of “your scores are decent, but you also used to make a living ramping from mountain to mountain on a dirt bike” probationary period, some high-profile International robberies go down and he’s the only one in the FBI who ramped from mountain to mountain on a dirt bike enough to recognize what’s really going on. The FBI laughs him out of the room, but Delroy Lindo gives him a shot anyway.
So Utah hooks up with Ray Winstone, who spends the whole film looking tired while smoking cigarettes and sighing. His goal is to surf this massive wave that everyone else is surfing, but only the best surfers in the world can surf. This is where he meets Bohdi. The wave kicks his ass, he almost drowns, and Bohdi saves his life, thinking “this knucklehead is pretty good at almost dying while doing extreme sports. He should join my crew.”
It’s important to understand that this version of Johnny Utah is famous for being Johnny Utah, and he goes undercover as Johnny Utah. The robbers know who he is and have access to the Internet. At one point later in the film new Bodhi admits he knew Utah was a cop all along, and everyone’s like “no shit.” (Then Johnny Utah fires his gun into the air going "argh".)
New Bodhi is a problem. There’s something kooky but magical about mystical bullshit coming out of Patrick Swayze. It just doesn’t work the same way for Édgar Ramírez, who mistakes looking dreamy for looking half awake. If nothing else, we have to believe that Ramírez and Luke Bracey’s Utah desperately want to make out, but that doesn’t come across at all. If the main two guys in your Point Break movie don’t want to s each other’s d, it seems the point is already broken enough.
These Point Break robbers are also full of shit to an annoying degree. Their idea is to do these eight extreme sport trails that no one has ever accomplished. Because they use so many resources on this quest (?), they also rob from the rich and give to the poor to achieve balance with mother nature (?). They are very sensitive, spiritual warriors. Until, that is, the film needs them to be Utah’s villains, at which point, they just start killing people, going against their much discussed principles.
This is your skeleton plot. Point Break doesn’t care about it, and I don’t think it cares what you think about it, either. It’s only there to offer excuses for director Ericson Core to get in a helicopter and film some extreme sports.
I’ve been very mean to this movie, so I would also like to go on record regarding these extreme sports sequences. They are incredible. You might as well be watching a non-fiction IMAX presentation on the subject, but no one can say Core didn’t capture this stuff in a way that puts you in the moment. When focused solely on this, the film actually becomes beautiful and thrilling. In fact, there’s a big rock climbing finale that almost made me sick from nervousness and vertigo. But by that point I was already too sick from other stuff for this one accolade to save the film.
