Running Head POINT BREAK MOVIEW

Point Break Movie



Point Break Movie

Introduction

It's hard to decide whether Point Break is a really bad good movie or a really good bad movie. On one hand, it boasts thrilling, original action sequences, a tightly woven caper plot, and a cast jam-packed with Hollywood middleweights acting -- and surfing -- their asses off. On the other hand, it also suffers from terrifying leaps of story logic, a vacuous emotional core, and some of the silliest dialogue ever spoken onscreen. It's a Hollywood formula movie at its best and worst. At the center of this conundrum is the greatest acting enigma of the age -- Keanu Reeves. Never has a man acted so poorly, spoken lines so blandly, for the cinematic enjoyment of so many. He churns out unintentionally comic performances in blockbuster after blockbuster, each time raising the question of how exactly he landed the role, and how much worse the movie would be without him. I suppose the answers to these riddles don't matter much, because, no matter how you come down on these weighty issues, when the dust settles, two indisputable points clearly emerge: Point Break is great fun to watch and Reeves was born to play the part of FBI agent Johnny Utah (Strauss 1991).

Discussion

The story is your basic high-concept Hollywood action premise. Utah is a young, eager FBI agent assigned to the Los Angeles bank robbery task force. His crusty veteran partner, Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey), has been trying for years to bring down a highly professional crew of bank robbers called the Ex-Presidents (known as such because they disguise themselves with novelty masks of former presidents during their robberies). Despite the ridicule of his colleagues, Pappas has long held the belief that the Ex-Presidents are surfers who use the robbery money to fund their presumably lavish lifestyle. So, with nothing else to go on, Pappas and Utah come up with the plan that Utah will go undercover as a surfer in order to infiltrate the beach-loving subculture and bring down the Ex-Presidents.

Utah's first move is to enlist the services of resident surfer girl-beach rat, Tyler Endicott (Lori Petty), who coaches Utah in the ways of surfing. She barks out orders like a drill sergeant and Utah does his best to keep up. These scenes are treated with all the earnestness of a samurai-in-training learning the ways of his ...