![]() There is the usual Gidget-esque intercutting of flat water with massive waves. Reeves makes a good enough fist of trying to stand up on his board for you to know that he needs four years’ daily work to become moderately proficient, instead of the few days it takes him to achieve cred with the gang. The surfing footage, of pro surfers backlit to conceal their faces, was praised by critics, which only underlines how little they know. Here you hope the film is laughing at itself, but it’s not. The second skydiving scene is an excuse to bring the film’s homoerotic undertones to the surface, Reeves and Swayze in full-frontal frottage clinch while daring each other to pull the ripcord. There are two skydiving scenes, the first of which has no function in the story but shows exhilarating footage over the American Southwest. There’s a terrific chase scene through the back streets and houses of Santa Monica, even if it does demonstrate that Reeves runs like a profoundly uncoordinated kid who couldn’t do the hundred in less than 20 seconds. The presidents’ masks on the robbers’ faces is an inspired choice. The film’s bank-robbing, rubber mask-wearing gang, the Ex-Presidents. Once they realised Keanu Reeves was Derek Zoolander, the penny dropped. Americans embarrassed that they couldn’t laugh at their stupidity in films like Point Break and Top Gun found a broad, unambiguous way of doing it through Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. ![]() Point Break is a key cultural reference point for the Zoolander films, created years later by Gen Xers trying to make sense, or comedy, of the youth they had wasted. Peter Iliff’s script sound like they’re spoken by a sentient being. It’s all there, in his inability to make even the silliest lines of W. But did he have any talent to sell out in the first place? And did he know he was selling out? Or worse, did he think he was selling out? He’s so earnest in his hopelessness in this movie, you almost want to hug him and whisper in his ear that he can be a beautiful schoolteacher and friend and father, instead of allowing his extraordinary good looks to drag him into a profession he’s no good at and towards ambitions he can never fulfil. Perhaps the generational poignancy of Point Break lies in this crossroads Reeves sold out. There’s a woman, played by Lori Petty, who teaches Johnny how to surf and gets him into the gang, but spends most of the movie tied up screaming for him to save her. ![]() The hunch leads Johnny to infiltrate a Malibu surf crew headed by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), a pretentious mystic whose dream is to surf a looming 50-year swell event at Bells Beach, among other things. They wear the masks of ex-US presidents Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson, but one of them chucks a browneye on CCTV that reveals a tan line. Reeves’ senior buddy Pappas, played by Gary Busey, gets a hunch that a gang of bank robbers must be surfers. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, a novice FBI agent and former college football star. Point Break should never have escaped the death spiral of its plot. Having watched it this week, I suspect it’s passed through good again and reached a badness from which it can never climb out. It generated cultural references, parodies and even a stage show, all through being somehow iconically good-bad. Being bad was never a problem for Bigelow’s Point Break: it became a cult movie and a defining artefact of the early 1990s by being so bad that millions of people thought it was good. True, the Kathryn Bigelow-directed original cannot age as poorly as its 2015 remake, which was born stale. As with many surfers passing their peak, it’s still acting the teenager, more ludicrous with each year.
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