There’s too much mumbo-jumbo backstory about a dead eco-guru, the mythic Ozaki 8 (a series of extreme sporting challenges) and the raid of Mother Earth/the poor and so on and so forth to leave room for character arcs. ![]() In overcomplicating the bandits’ motives, the film sets itself up for a fall. ![]() Read more ‘Point Break’ Characters Headed to ‘Payday 2’ Online Game But they also had Bigelow’s eye for action set-pieces and bro-tastic homoeroticism to play with. In 1991, a peaking, post- Dirty Dancing/ Ghost Patrick Swayze and an ascendant, pre- Speed Keanu Reeves pulled off the nearly impossible and made the relationship between the ludicrously named Johnny Utah and Bodhi work. Taken out of its post-Reagan context and remade with a forced backstory and 100 percent more supermodel types (bye, Lori Petty) in 3D, cinematographer-director Ericson Core’s Point Break strips the silly fun and relatively straight-ahead narrative from the original for a humorless, if photogenic, spin on extreme crime. In Bigelow’s hands, a potentially conventional story becomes a subversive, anti-establishment film about being seduced, blackmailed and radicalised by your crush.Looking back, the peculiar and somehow charming pseudo-philosophical machismo about communing with the earth of Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break was actually ahead of the bro-culture curve that seems to be everywhere now, and so never wanting to leave well enough alone, the cultish film was ripe for a remake. But so rarely has the action genre anchored displays of masculine competition in such mutual respect and affection, daring to be outlandish and deadly serious all at once. When Point Break was released, critics were quick to dismiss it as shallow, blathering machismo. The film’s third act is propulsive and high-energy, concluding with an epilogue that, while bittersweet, stresses the genuine bond underlying the pair’s treacherous flirtation. However, once Bodhi realises the FBI is after him, the raised stakes elicit something monstrous in him, dragging Johnny into his downward spiral. It’s an incredibly centred performance enhanced by Swayze’s controlled physicality, around which Johnny suddenly makes more sense: he’s itching for something, and his rival possesses exactly what he needs to be set free. Swayze fortunately balances out Reeves with a tremendously grounding presence, levelling his co-star’s more theatrical impulses. What do we expect from a game of cat-and-mouse where the cat is yet to realise he too is a mouse? There’s something captivatingly uncomfortable about the way the character sits in his own skin. Granted, Reeves is sometimes stilted in his performance, but even this somehow works – Johnny is straining to follow FBI protocol as an agent of the state, while everything in his body craves a higher pleasure. Photograph: c 20thC.Fox/Everett/Rex Features ‘I wanted to play it like a love story between two men,’ Patrick Swayze (right) has said of the dynamic between Johnny and Bodhi. To paraphrase Emily Brontë: whatever their souls are made of, Johnny and Bodhi’s are the same. They’re motivated by similar things, chasing the same feelings, it’s just that one channels his desires through legally sanctioned avenues while the other seeks it elsewhere. Sure, Johnny is an appendage of authority chasing the epitome of lawlessness, but the traditional hero/villain dynamic is also transgressed by their natural kinship.Īs Tyler observes early on, the pair share a certain “kamikaze look”. There’s something electric in how the boundaries between “right” and “wrong” are so sensationalised as to be operatic. Not to mention the film’s hair-raising skydiving sequences, or the five-minute foot chase shot with a “pogo-cam” to replicate the urgency of bodies in pursuit. Bigelow recognises and embraces this thrill, rendering it stylistically in the way arched bodies glide across water, sunlight glistens through sea spray, and how the camera alternates between fluid and frenetic.
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