The "Point Break" redeux throws in some great extreme sports scenes in place of much of what made the original film work so well.

Rating: 3/10 (29 December 2015)

When a movie works, it's due to a combination of great writing, directing, casting, acting, set design, make-up and hairstyling, costuming, lighting, cinematography, visual and sound effects, music and mood, not to mention factors like effective marketing, the timing of the film's release, and even luck and other intangibles that are virtually impossible to predict or control. When enough of those elements produce a film that most people like (or, a few people love), it's like a bit of magic. Trying to duplicate that feat is extremely difficult, yet filmmakers still insist on remaking movies that came out well the first time. Remakes rarely, if ever, recapture that magic of the original film. After a quick IMDb.com search of titles from various genres and decades that have been remade, I found very few remakes which rate higher than their predecessors. I believe that 2015's "Point Break" (PG-13, 1:53) similarly falls short.
In this movie, as in 1991's "Point Break", a young guy called Johnny Utah goes undercover for the FBI to try identifying and catching a group of mysterious adrenaline junkies committing a string of crimes. But the similarities don't go much farther. Even the title means something different here. Rather than using the phrase as the surfing term that it is, this movie contains dialog that twists it into meaning something more like "breaking point", as in an individual's personal breaking point. That's because the 2015 update changes the gang that Johnny's investigating from surfers into the most extreme of extreme sports athletes. These guys are supposedly attempting a completely fictional list of extreme sports challenges called the "Osaki 8". These "ordeals", as the script refers to them, have new-age-sounding names like "Emerging Force", "Life of Wind" and "Master of Six Lives" and are supposed to lead to spiritual enlightenment. But who knows if that's true? No one has yet survived all eight parts of the challenge! 2015's "Point Break" is like the 1991 version on steroids and speed and more adrenaline and whatever else you can think of. Luke Bracey plays Utah, a former high-speed motocross star who left the sport after an especially dangerous ride goes horribly wrong and is now a trainee with the FBI. Delroy Lindo is the instructor who expresses doubts that Utah has what it takes to be an agent. When a small group of daredevils pulls off a series of highly expensive thefts around the world (each heist coupled with a different death-defying stunt), Utah's instructor turns to him for help and sends him undercover to identify and catch the bad guys. Aided by British agent Angelo Pappas (Ray Winstone), Utah catches up with the gang at a huge surfing party off the coast of France. A spiritual rebel called Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez) apparently sees something in the fellow extreme sports enthusiast who just showed up out of nowhere because Bodhi befriends Utah and makes him part of his inner circle, which includes the beautiful and equally spiritual Samsara Dietz (Teresa Palmer). What follows is some very extreme rock climbing, wingsuit flying and snowboarding as Utah tries to prove that this is the gang of criminals that he is pursuing, even as he bonds with the members of Bodhi's group. All the while, the scenery is more beautiful, the stunts are more dangerous, the action is more intense and the plot is more violent than last time. While this movie's visuals are considerably more spectacular than in the original, 2015's "Point Break" lacks the colorful characters, sense of fun and marginally believable logic of that 1991 version.
Some may think it unfair to compare this remake with the movie that inspired it, but 2015's "Point Break" seems to beg for the comparison. The new version reuses the names of the main characters from the first movie and even recasts one of the original actors (the FBI director who played "LBJ" in the earlier version). The 2015 film also pays homage to the 1991 film in other ways, such as the inclusion of a surfing scene. That, however, feels more like an obligatory nod to this movie's origins rather than a heartfelt honoring of the original because the remake changes almost everything else about the plot, the characters and their motivations. Without the name "Point Break" attached to it, this wouldn't be much more than a second-tier action movie, an ungrounded film with little reason to exist on its own.
Very little of this "Point Break" overhaul works. The actors aren't believable in their roles, their characters act inconsistently (and even non-sensically) and the script puts dialog in their mouths which often sounds dumb. Here's one example of that last point: When Utah cautions Bodhi saying "You're gonna cross a line you can't come back from," Bodhi responds, "That's the difference between us. All you see are lines. We see the truth." To quote another character later in the film, "What the hell does that even mean?" The only thing that makes this movie special is its fantastic stunts, the impressive cinematography that captures them and the spectacular landscapes in which they take place. Those scenes alone may make the film worth seeing for some Movie Fans, but for most of us, that won't be enough to redeem a remake that's otherwise pretty dumb. I enjoyed those scenes but the main thing they did for me as a reviewer was keep me from giving this movie the lower grade that the rest of the film deserves. Yes, I happen to be a big fan of the original "Point Break", but even judging the 2015 version completely on its own merits, it falls short of what I would consider a quality action movie. "C"