Eight years on, it feels as if the movie-loving public at large has almost completely memory-holed the existence of the Point Break remake, released in 2015. It feels destined to live on solely as fodder for future listicles along the lines of “25 Movie Remakes You Forgot Existed,” alongside the similarly disremembered new Conan the Barbarian with Jason Momoa (2011), the new Robocop with Joel Kinnaman (2014), and the new Total Recall with Colin Farrell (2012). (Even I, a professional movie-watcher, had to resort to Google to remember whether I’d seen these or not.)
It’s understandable that the remake boom of the 2010s, when studios pushed out a slew of soullessly Mid new movies based on beloved classics from 20 years earlier, is a period most would rather forget (or have already effortlessly forgotten, even without intending to). Yet it’s criminal that 2015’s Point Break should be lumped in with these others. It relies on basically all the same tropes of the period, but turns them into sublime self-parody; the result is one of the most brilliantly idiotic movies of all time.
The 20-teens were a golden age of origin stories whose makers felt inexplicably obligated to explain how their lead characters got their names (see: Han becoming “Han Solo” in Solo: A Star Wars Story, or Superman, in Man of Steel, explaining that it’s not really an “S.”). The Point Break remake’s version of this moment—delivered shirtlessly in a pensive monologue by star Luke Bracey, his hair gently blowing in the breeze, because Point Break (2015) director Ericson Core is to men’s hair what Terrence Malick is to stalks of wheat—goes something like this:
My mom was a Ute Indian. That's why they call me "Utah." Means "mountain people." Maybe that's why I was so good on the slopes.
Yes, this was a real line in a real movie that came out in theaters. If you aren’t entertained by the Point Break remake, you are dead.
Here’s the requisite paragraph about this film’s RottenTomatoes score (11%) and how critics hated it at the time. And of course they wrote mean reviews. Comparing the Point Break remake unfavorably to Point Break is so easy you should have to donate your freelance fee to charity. It’s plainly obvious that Point Break, one of the best movies of the 90s, has many, many things that the remake lacks.
The original is a testosterone-fueled adventure in which a square ex-jock from the Midwest (it’s hilarious in its own right that the square Midwestern jock is played by a guy with a Hawaiian name who reads “surfer dude” from 50 paces) goes undercover to bust a crew of adrenaline-junkie surfer/bank robbers and almost goes native. It’s a bromance movie that draws strength from its clear dichotomies and from the unheard-of-for-its-genre female gaze of director Katherine Bigelow. Keanu Reeves’ acting is unintentionally funny, Gary Busey (as Johnny Utah’s crotchety partner Angelo Pappas) is intentionally funny, Lori Petty makes a great spunky tomboy love interest, and—as Bodhi, the gang’s philosopher-king ringleader—Patrick Swayze is 1000% committed and spookily serious, seducing us with his New Agey bullshit just as he seduces Johnny Utah. Point Break is somehow both incredibly corny and genuinely groundbreaking, the product of a bunch of weird late-‘80s cultural trends crashing and colliding to create something almost miraculous.
There’s something inherently hilarious about the remake process, whereby movie execs take movie heroes that pop culture has long established as “cool” and figure, Okay, now all we have to do is make them even cooler, and then do so using only the cringiest 50-something hypebeast’s conception of “cool.” Leaked clips from the upcoming remake of Road House remake—possibly the only other movie in existence as beloved and kitsch-cool as Point Break— indicate that the new Dalton, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, has been reimagined as an MMA fighter. Road House, a movie about famous bar bouncers (er, “coolers”) who travel from honky tonk to honky tonk keeping hillbillies from doing property damage, simply cannot exist in a 21st-century reality in which MMA-fighting-as-a-career is also a thing. And yet movie execs simply can’t help themselves from trying to put hats on top of hats. That’s exactly what they did with the Point Break remake—only they do it so much, and so majestically, that it becomes something like a towering, awe-inspiring skyscraper made entirely of hats on hats.
For starters, the Point Break remake turns square ex-jock-turned FBI agent Johnny Utah into an extreme-sports YouTube star who decides to join the FBI after he loses his best friend in a motocross accident in the first scene. When the agency is tasked with catching a group of diamond thieves who infiltrate a sorting facility in a Mumbai highrise and then escape by parachuting off the building (while scattering the diamonds to the eager slum-dwellers below), Utah’s FBI handler, played by Delroy Lindo, urges his protégé to present his theory of the crime to a room full of skeptical suits.
Star Luke Bracey, one of those interchangeable Australian Chrises, Lukes, and Joels, who looks uncannily like a young, sexy version of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs styled for a Billabong ad, stands behind a podium in front of a bank of monitors and portentously intones, “I believe that the criminals behind these robberies are, like me, extreme sports poly-athletes.”
Hat, meet hat. You can practically hear the Point Break remake’s elevator pitch in your head as you watch it: What if instead of doing ONE cool sport, Johnny Utah did ALL of the cool sports? The idea that someone who has spent a lifetime mastering motocross could also be an expert at surfing, BASE jumping, snowboarding, wing suiting, solo rock climbing, and MMA fighting (yes, that one is in there, and it’s the film’s worst sequence by a mile) is preposterous on its face. But this is a film that posits that the only thing required for extreme sports excellence is attitude.
Whereas the original takes its title, “point break,” from the actual surfing jargon for a specific kind of wave the Dead Presidents gang favors, the remake posits an entirely new meaning. The relevant exchange occurs just before the Point Break remake’s (incredible) wing-suiting scene, between new Bodhi, played by sentient hair tendril Edgar Ramirez, and sexy Buffalo Bill Johnny Utah:
This is the Point Break remake in a nutshell: idiotic in exactly the same way as countless other bad Hollywood remakes, but so maximalist and absurdly inventive that it achieves something approaching art. It proves that if you start at preposterous and keep going, sometimes you hit lore.
Anyway, Johnny Utah infiltrates Bodhi’s gang, who have been reimagined not just as SoCal adrenaline junkies robbing banks to finance their Endless Summer lifestyle, but as Eurotrash ecowarriors, in pursuit of something called “The Ozaki Eight.” This was created, Utah explains in his initial FBI Power Point presentation, by Ono Ozaki, “one of the first recognized extreme poly-athletes.” Ozaki, Utah explains, “challenged the extreme sports world to a series of eight ordeals that he said honored the forces of nature.” Being an extreme sports poly-athlete himself, Utah is both the only one in the FBI to realize that Bodhi’s gang is attempting to complete the Ozaki Eight, and the only one with the extreme sports poly-athlete skills to infiltrate their gang.
That’s the how of it, but the funny thing about the Point Break remake is that it never really bothers with the why. In the original, Keanu-Utah is nearly seduced by Swayze-Bodhi’s spooky-but-sorta-true pontifications about refusing to live by society’s rules: “This was never about money for us. It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins... we show them that the human spirit is still alive.”
Kind of makes you want to delete your resumes and buy a surfboard and a Reagan mask, doesn’t it? Yet there was a clear conflict between the lengths to which Swayze-Bodhi was willing to go to achieve that lifestyle—robbing banks, but also eventually killing cops, and at one point even kidnapping Keanu-Utah’s girlfriend—and Utah’s own sense of personal morality. A line had been crossed.
In the remake… well, there basically is no conflict. The new Bodhi gang is sponsored by a Middle Eastern billionaire, and they steal solely to give all the money away and do cool stunts. In addition to the diamond heist performed in order drop the diamonds on a slum, they hijack a cargo plane carrying pallets of paper money simply to unstrap it in the air and rain down cash on remote villages in Mexico, even as they’re leaping from a moving plane and skydiving into the Cave of Swallows, not opening their chutes until they’re well below the ground. In so doing, they become “the first and only to make a sky-Earth transition,” as Utah describes it. (How much slum dwellers and campesinos actually benefit from a hail of falling diamonds or a flurry of scattered paper money is up for debate).
New Bodhi’s gang is guilty mostly only of fancy vandalism. Bodhi doesn’t actually kill anyone, unless you count the members of his gang—named, incredibly, Chowder, Roach, Grommet, and Jeff—who die one by one in the process of completing all of Ozaki’s stunts. And at least one of these deaths is the direct result not of Bodhi, but of Utah himself, for pushing them to take an even more XXXTREME line down cliffs on their snowboards. Not everyone has that mountain-people blood, it seems.
As for Utah’s love interest, Samsara (yes, the Sanskrit word for wandering), played by Teresa Palmer (trading tomboy Lori Petty for an actress who looks like a bikini model, natch), Utah accidentally kills her himself during an attempt to foil the gang’s bank robbery on an Italian mountaintop. Though not before the two share numerous cannoodly interludes that look like massive-budgeted REI ads, sharing meals atop mountains in the alps with Bracey wearing plaid flannels that look like they came from the Hurley apres-snowboard collection.
During one deep chat by the fire, it comes out that Samsara even had a personal connection to the mysterious eco warrior, Ono Ozaki. “When my parents died in an avalanche when I was nine, he gave me a home,” Samsara tells Utah. “He could have finished the entire Eight, he was that good. But instead he got himself killed giving back for that ordeal,” he continues. “He positioned his small boat in the North Atlantic between a Norwegian whaling ship and a pod of humpbacked whales. As much as I worshiped Ozaki, that was his Achilles heel. He truly believed that he could change the world with an idea.”
“Ideas can be powerful,” Utah mutters between hair sways.
“Not as powerful as a whaling ship.”
Aaaaand, scene!
Yet the Point Break remake wouldn’t be as watchable as it is if it were just hilariously, exuberantly stupid. If himbo screenwriter Kurt Wimmer, previously the inventor of the cult classic, just-for-movies martial art “gun kata,” as popularized in 2002’s Equilibrium, is responsible for giving the film its epic lore (the mythos of Ono Ozaki seems to have transcended Point Break the same way that Gun Kata transcended Equilibrium), director Core (previously a cinematographer on The Fast and The Furious, itself a spiritual Point Break remake) gives the Point Break remake its genuinely thrilling sense of style and scale.
For most of the movie, Core—and is “Ericson Core” not itself a perfect Point Break name?— appears to be working with an unlimited drone-and-helicopter budget. Most of it consists of his cameras swooping around the world’s best extreme sports athletes performing their most death-defying stunts, filmed with state of the art cameras and no CGI.
This may be the main aspect separating the Point Break remake from the other forgotten remakes of the period: where so many of the others felt like cheap CGI retreads, the Point Break remake feels extravagantly expensive. Even as the dialogue tickles your gag reflex, the stunts take your breath away. Whether it’s a big wave surfing scene, supposedly taking in Biarritz (though instantly recognizable as Teahupo’o to anyone who has ever leafed through a surf mag), wind suiting through the Swiss Alps, rock climbing up Angel Falls in Venezuela, or BASE jumping into the Cave of Swallows, Point Break constantly combines the best of Nat Geo and the X-Games. Wing suiting off of cliffs, flying so close to the ground that it splits the grass? Some guys really did that! The fact that humans genuinely risked death for a movie this dumb is part of what makes it art.
The Point Break remake essentially defines the TV Trope described as the “Rule of Cool,” stating that “the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness. (...) All but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality as long as the result is wicked sweet or awesome. Also known in some circles as a ‘rad herring,’ in which something doesn't make sense within the guidelines of the story's reality, but it's too cool not to include it.”
And in that way, the Point Break remake is perfectly in keeping with its source material: it’s a very particular time capsule of its cultural context, and a fascinating mess of contradictions that constantly, thrillingly rides the line between stunning ineptitude and hypercompetence. It’s also super sick.
