Point Break

Ericson Core – 2015 – USA 

Kathryn Bigelow’s semi-camp-classic Point Break (1991) may not be a testament for the ages, but it is an extremely fun and satisfying action film that probably deserved being left alone rather than remade into such a forgettable, run-of-the-mill movie as this.  Despite a series of wowing action scenes, it’s all strangely uninteresting.  The problem is that, in the age of special effects, it’s hard to be impressed with stunts even after the filmmakers go to such trouble to assure you that what you are seeing is real, at least to some extent.  There is an elaborate “flying suit” sequence in the film, for example, where I would have been happy to just enjoy it and go along for the ride, but the suits are so absurd that all I could do was laugh as I no longer cared if the guys were really flying or if most of this was done with CGI.  Ditto for the surfing, set amid waves so enormous that it’s difficult to take the scenes seriously.  The general philosophy of the film – as with most remakes – seems to be that anything vaguely memorable from the original film now has to be amplified, bigger, huger and so outsized and outlandish that the notion of little Patrick Swayze jumping out of a little plane in the old film should seem pathetic and quaint by comparison.  That’s a big failure in judgement and execution that this remake never overcomes.  The appeal of the Bigelow film was precisely related to its grounding in some kind of gravitational reality that made its ambitious stunts and camerawork so thrilling.  There is something appealing in the core idea of extreme sport “eco-warriors” acting as latter-day Robin Hoods, but why bother abandoning almost all of the particulars of the original film if all you’re going to replace them with is easily predictable clichés that we’re all already so tired of in every other action movie?  The people who made this film don’t appear to have much knowledge or affection for the original anyway, so why bother remaking it in the first place?  It’s not like Point Break was so heavy in the public consciousness that it was crying out for a reboot.  The only point of trivia about the remake that interests me is the fact that its director, Ericson Core, was the cinematographer on The Fast and the Furious (2001), which was, oddly, an almost scene-for-scene (and unacknowledged) remake of Point Break, right down to the undercover FBI hero letting the bandit-with-a-heart-of-gold go at the end instead of bringing him in.