The masked man is Patrick Swayze, the cop is Keanu Reeves, the woman who has sicced one on the other is the director Kathryn Bigelow, and the thing that binds them all together is “Point Break.” Those of us who love the film, which is showing in a new restoration, at Metrograph, talk about it in much the same way that others talk about “Showgirls”—i.e., as what used to be called a cult movie, before it became clear that there are only cults of varying sizes. It was released in 1991, the year of “Nevermind” and Desert Storm, though you could also think of it as the era when everyone in Hollywood movies looked slightly wet—appropriate here, since “Point Break” is about surfing. Also law enforcement and skydiving.
Describe any film too briskly and you risk turning it into a screwball comedy. (“Phantom Thread”: she feeds him poisonous mushrooms, but he digs it.) That said, the crucial thing to know about “Point Break” is that Keanu Reeves plays a star quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes named Johnny Utah who becomes an F.B.I. agent and goes undercover with a gang of surfers—led by Swayze’s character, a lion-maned fellow by the name of Bodhi, as in Bodhisattva—who dress up as ex-Presidents and rob banks. It sounds weird, but then all action thrillers—all genre movies—are weird, albeit in a way that we spend our lives learning to ignore. Not “Point Break,” which wears its weirdness so cockily that its cousins start to seem like the real oddballs. (...)
Working with the cinematographer Donald Peterman, Bigelow packs “Point Break” ’s first act with dull, grayish-blue interiors that seem not filled with but made of L.A. smog: banks, offices, a sad indoor pool. One reason that the ensuing plot swerves feel right is that, after fifteen minutes of this, you welcome some fresh air and sunshine. As Utah embraces the ways of the surfer, the color palette moves from grayish to yellowish, and then, when Bodhi hips him to skydiving, from yellowish to cloudless blue. For the final scene, in which Bodhi finally gets his comeuppance, Bigelow takes us back to the beach, but also to those miserable smoggy grays, as though to suggest Utah’s world swallowing Bodhi’s whole.
Taken together, this can all feel like a string of vivid tableaux: a nighttime orgy of beach football; Reeves all pink and dewy, cuddling with his love interest in a black-sheeted bed; Swayze (well, mostly his stunt double Matt Archbold) riding giants, longboard muddying the air with seminal spurts of seawater. When you’re not gulping down a set piece, you’re starved for the next one—which is only right, since chasing the next big rush is more or less the point of “Point Break.” One particular rush is conspicuously un-chased: nobody watches this film without wondering why Bodhi and Utah don’t just sleep together. (“You want me so bad, it’s like acid in your mouth,” the surfer tells the cop.) But you could make a similar observation about almost any macho American movie of the period—compared with Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers horsing around in the surf in “Rocky III,” Reeves and Swayze look practically monkish. Besides, “Point Break” is the rare action flick that explains why its homoerotic subtext never becomes text: with death sports, Bodhi and Utah have discovered something better than sex. The catch is that their thrill-seeking is non-fungible and thus ultimately solitary; in “Point Break,” there is only you and your bottomless appetite. Surfing leads the adrenaline junkie to bank heists, and onward to free-falling, kidnapping, and bigger waves. Utah’s partner orders two meatball subs and then, before he’s taken a bite, regrets not ordering three.
“Point Break” is all about pushing it to the limit, so allow me to take this a step further. Once you’ve been numbed to the oddities of the plot and dialogue, what jump out at you, paradoxically, are the bits you already recognize. Consider Keanu Reeves’s voice. In all likelihood, you have been hearing this voice for years; it’s Keanu Reeves, the guy who speaks an obscure dialect of English called Uh, the actor who, in the early nineties, was known to millions as half of Bill and Ted. Which makes it all the more fascinating that Reeves is playing a straight-edged detective who is pretending to be a SoCal guy. There is a brief, early scene in which Utah, dipping his toe into his undercover persona, affects a surfer-bro accent, i.e., his own but even drawlier. It is a genuinely disorienting moment—reminiscent of the famous tale of how Charlie Chaplin entered a Chaplin lookalike contest and got second—so that when Reeves returns to his “normal” voice in the next scene, it’s as though you’re hearing him for the first time. Each “uh” is a symphony.
As with Keanu Reeves’s voice, so with everything you know, or thought you knew, from other movies: the disillusioned hero throwing his badge in the muck; the novice turning into a pro in a single montage; the detective with a heart of gold mourning his partner’s death with a “Noooooo” so long you could stand up, leave the theatre, answer some work e-mails, walk back to your seat, and still be less than halfway through. To ask what Bigelow does, exactly, to make these things seem so jarring is to miss the point. She doesn’t have to do anything.
Working with the cinematographer Donald Peterman, Bigelow packs “Point Break” ’s first act with dull, grayish-blue interiors that seem not filled with but made of L.A. smog: banks, offices, a sad indoor pool. One reason that the ensuing plot swerves feel right is that, after fifteen minutes of this, you welcome some fresh air and sunshine. As Utah embraces the ways of the surfer, the color palette moves from grayish to yellowish, and then, when Bodhi hips him to skydiving, from yellowish to cloudless blue. For the final scene, in which Bodhi finally gets his comeuppance, Bigelow takes us back to the beach, but also to those miserable smoggy grays, as though to suggest Utah’s world swallowing Bodhi’s whole.
Taken together, this can all feel like a string of vivid tableaux: a nighttime orgy of beach football; Reeves all pink and dewy, cuddling with his love interest in a black-sheeted bed; Swayze (well, mostly his stunt double Matt Archbold) riding giants, longboard muddying the air with seminal spurts of seawater. When you’re not gulping down a set piece, you’re starved for the next one—which is only right, since chasing the next big rush is more or less the point of “Point Break.” One particular rush is conspicuously un-chased: nobody watches this film without wondering why Bodhi and Utah don’t just sleep together. (“You want me so bad, it’s like acid in your mouth,” the surfer tells the cop.) But you could make a similar observation about almost any macho American movie of the period—compared with Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers horsing around in the surf in “Rocky III,” Reeves and Swayze look practically monkish. Besides, “Point Break” is the rare action flick that explains why its homoerotic subtext never becomes text: with death sports, Bodhi and Utah have discovered something better than sex. The catch is that their thrill-seeking is non-fungible and thus ultimately solitary; in “Point Break,” there is only you and your bottomless appetite. Surfing leads the adrenaline junkie to bank heists, and onward to free-falling, kidnapping, and bigger waves. Utah’s partner orders two meatball subs and then, before he’s taken a bite, regrets not ordering three.
“Point Break” is all about pushing it to the limit, so allow me to take this a step further. Once you’ve been numbed to the oddities of the plot and dialogue, what jump out at you, paradoxically, are the bits you already recognize. Consider Keanu Reeves’s voice. In all likelihood, you have been hearing this voice for years; it’s Keanu Reeves, the guy who speaks an obscure dialect of English called Uh, the actor who, in the early nineties, was known to millions as half of Bill and Ted. Which makes it all the more fascinating that Reeves is playing a straight-edged detective who is pretending to be a SoCal guy. There is a brief, early scene in which Utah, dipping his toe into his undercover persona, affects a surfer-bro accent, i.e., his own but even drawlier. It is a genuinely disorienting moment—reminiscent of the famous tale of how Charlie Chaplin entered a Chaplin lookalike contest and got second—so that when Reeves returns to his “normal” voice in the next scene, it’s as though you’re hearing him for the first time. Each “uh” is a symphony.
As with Keanu Reeves’s voice, so with everything you know, or thought you knew, from other movies: the disillusioned hero throwing his badge in the muck; the novice turning into a pro in a single montage; the detective with a heart of gold mourning his partner’s death with a “Noooooo” so long you could stand up, leave the theatre, answer some work e-mails, walk back to your seat, and still be less than halfway through. To ask what Bigelow does, exactly, to make these things seem so jarring is to miss the point. She doesn’t have to do anything.
