Point Break (1991)

Movie Club has made a liar of me.  I swore I was never going to watch this movie again, but it got picked for last week and I (mistakenly) thought enough time had passed and I wouldn't be able to speak to specifics.  Except that the specifics don't matter!  Because this movie is dumb!  It's barely trying to be a Dramatic Buddy Cop thing because it's succeeding too hard at being an Overtly Homoerotic Star-Crossed Lovers thing.  This should have been airing on Bravo the way A Christmas Story was on TNT.    Obviously, Kathryn Bigelow went on to do bigger and better (?) things until they gave her an Oscar.  I'm not a huge fan of the stories she chooses to highlight but I think she's a good director.  It's currently streaming on Paramount+ and on Tubi for free.  Originally posted 04 Apr 16.    This might get me a lot of hate but it needs to be said:  Point Break is a terrible movie.  I'm not saying you can't like it because it's bad; I like all kinds of bad things.  Just recognize that it is bad.

FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is a young hotshot trying to make a name for himself in the Los Angeles field office.  He is assigned to a gruff older partner (Gary Busey) who has a theory on a gang of bank robbers.  He believes that they are surfers who use the scores to fund their international wave chasing.  Utah agrees to go undercover and infiltrate the surfing community to determine who are the most likely suspects.  He meets a young lady (Lori Petty) and convinces her to teach him how to surf but it isn't until he meets surfing guru Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) that it all starts to click.

There is a lot that has been made out of this movie.  Christy used the word "bromance" in her description, and I think that's what a lot of people got out of it.  I wonder if they just blanked out everything after the whole "firing a gun in the air because you can't shoot your buddy" scene.  Maybe it's been romanticized because Patrick Swayze is just so damn cool.  The impulse is to make him out to be some kind of tragic Robin Hood-like figure.

Maybe it's me.  Maybe I missed how it's really about standing up to The Man or finding out how you respond under pressure and what that teaches you about life.  Maybe it's just a nostalgia thing for early 90's action movies and I am out of the loop because I'm only seeing it now.  I don't know.  The surfing and skydiving scenes were beautifully done and that might be enough to push it over the edge into guilty pleasure for you guys.

I thought it was a big, dumb action movie and I'm okay with that being all it is.  It's just not a big, dumb action movie that I could watch again.