Product: Point Break [VHS] (1991)
Rating: 4.0
The ultimate rush...well, almost
A few months ago, a favorite sports writer of mine (Bill Simmons, AKA the Sports Guy of ESPN.com fame) was lamenting the lack of rewatchable movies coming out of Hollywood over the past half-decade, and comparing the recent paucity to the abundance of such movies in the 1980's and '90's. While I'm about ten years younger than the Sports Guy and not given to nostalgia anyway, it wasn't hard for me to see his point. Which brings me to Point Break, one of the quintessential rewatchable movies of the past 20 years. If I'm flipping through channels and I come to this movie, unless there's a Celtics or Patriots playoff game on, I'm watching. Period. It doesn't matter that basic cable is bound to edit some of the best parts, or that I've seen the movie about 15 times already and own the DVD, or that my wife may become even more convinced of my profound patheticness. I simply can't not watch Point Break if it's on, which can be said about very few movies indeed. In fact, if I were to create a list of the top ten guy movies I've seen in my life, it would go something like the following:1. Goodfellas2. Road House3. Commando4. True Romance5. Fight Club6. Heat7. The Terminator8. Sin City9. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels10. SwingersHowever, if were to make a list of the top ELEVEN guy movies I've seen in my lifetime, it's a safe bet that Point Break would sneak onto that list. Released just before the mid-90's surge of super-advanced special effects that yielded such super-terrible movies as Twister, Independence Day, and pretty much anything involving Jerry Bruckheimer, Point Break is nothing short of B-movie heaven, with all the familiar trappings thereof: rampant overacting, testosterone-laden dialogue, a series of highly implausible occurrences, and men determined to resolve everything with violence. It's fast-paced, deliriously stupid, and just suspenseful enough to keep your eyes glued to the screen.At the same time, Point Break succeeds because its heart is always in the right place. Sure, it doesn't have the huge budget and nifty effects that characterized so many of the Hollywood blockbuster released in the past decade or so, but Point Break did manage to boast a plot and characters that were at least somewhat believable and well-developed, to go with lots of skillful direction from Kathryn Bigelow. And, of course, you get one completely iconic line from Keanu Reeves: "I am an EFF-BEE-EYE Agent!". His career was all downhill from that one, let me tell you.Even the name of the hero is likably improbable: Johnny Utah (!), played in slightly-less-wooden-than-usual fashion by Keanu Reeves in his pre-Speed days. At the start of the movie, Johhny is a strait-laced FBI rookie and ex-college football star who gets an assignment to the Bureau's robbery unit in the criminal hotbed of LA. Providing the yin to Johhny's yang (or maybe it's the other way around) is Patrick Swayze's Bodhi ("They call him Bodha-Zeffa"), a walking bundle of contradictions: a laid-back surfer dude and martial-arts expert who spouts heavy philosophy when he's not leading his gang of ex-president-mask-wearing adrenaline-junkie bank robbers on heists to finance their globetrotting adventures.Naturally, the two are put on a collision course when Johnny and his grizzled partner Angelo Pappas (the great Gary Busey) are assigned to bringing down the ex-presidents and Johnny starts frequenting the local beaches in the guise of a novice surfer. It's not long before Bodhi and co. (who turn out to be quite fervent college-football fans for a bunch of slacking surfers) take Johnny under their collective wing and introduce him to their thrill-seeking, anti-mainstream worldview. And it's also not long before Johnny loosens up, falls for a surfer chick, and begins to sympathize with his new criminal buddies. That's just the bare bones of the plot though; you also get:-A couple of showdowns with a group of local surf Nazis with names like Bunker and Warchild (one of them played by Anthony Kiedis, who turned out to be a decent actor when he wasn't putting out mediocre albums with the Red Hot Chili Peppers).-Shootouts, fistfights, chases, a gratuitous car explosion, surfing, and skydiving: everything you could want in an action movie, and more!-One of our finest actors (John C. McGinley of Office Space, Platoon, and tons of other movies) as Harp, Johnny's tightly wound and often-screaming FBI supervisor, who's had it with Johnny and Angelo's wild antics and lack of results and isn't afraid to show it.-One of movie history's great bank heist scenes towards the end. Is there a movie that wouldn't benefit from a tense, closely-filmed robbery sequence with an impending sense of doom, the kind where you know something is going to go wrong and people (both innocent and otherwise) are going to die? Granted, you don't quite get anything on par with the legendary downtown-LA shootout from Heat, but I was impressed nonetheless.And, yeah, that's pretty much it. Point Break is not by any means a great movie, but it is a pretty good one, I think, and essential for enthusiasts of mid-budget action flicks. Sadly, it seems Hollywood isn't churning out movies like this one with anywhere near the regularity it once was, but Point Break should be appreciated all the more for that fact.