What made the original Point Break great? It was simple, and most importantly fun. Who wouldn’t love a surfer/heist movie starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, with Anthony Kiedis hanging around in the background with stupid hair? It didn’t try to be gritty or high art; it was a film that knew exactly what it wanted to do and then did it.
Point Break the remake, however, is about as fun as being smacked in the face with the blandest novelisation of an Inconvenient Truth.
In the interest of fairness I will say there is some good to be found. Ray Winstone is in it. That’s it.
It is in the writing that we find the biggest faults of the film. The movie succeeds in creating the world’s most boring collection of ‘extreme’ clichés.
The dialogue of the entire film can be summed up thusly: If it is someone not in the FBI talking it sounds like the poorly written, pointless waffle of a Fast and Furious fan-fiction. If it is someone in the FBI, dialogue is used exclusively to fulfil the tired clichés of the police genre. I’ve never seen a movie so hypocritically preachy. The philosophy of these criminals, endlessly repeated throughout the near two hour runtime, is to save the environment through a series of extreme ordeals that will make them spiritually ‘one with the earth’. In practice this becomes stealing from US global interests while doing extreme sports. We constantly find our ‘anti-heroes’ partying on luxury super-yachts and in mountain chalets surrounded by scantily clad women (with stereotypically gratuitous ass shots in tow). The movie tries to excuse this by saying they all hate it, but surely then the question becomes; why are they there in the first place?
The one word summary of this movie would be ‘dumb’. The characters are dumb, their tattoos are dumb, their ideology is dumb, the plot is dumb, the use of CGI is dumb, and when the movie isn’t dumb it’s boring. In the end, I had to laugh at how Darwin Award-esque it all was.
Image: Bill Brown; Picasa Web Albums, Creative Commons.