Welcome to Millennial Review, where we task millennials to review pop culture pillars from yesteryear. Below, Alex Putterman shares his thoughts upon watching Point Break, the 1991 crime thriller about surfers who rob banks, for the first time. We begin with an introduction from a previous generation for whom this piece of culture was particularly meaningful.
Background from Generation Y’s Ben Koo
You wouldn’t be able to spot Point Break‘s cult classic status without some sleuthing on the web. It didn’t crack the top 25 1991 box office grosses, its Rotten Tomatoes score is a modest 68 percent, it garnered no significant award nominations (we won’t count the three MTV movie award nominations including “Most Desirable Male”), and it clocked in at a respectable but not eye-popping 7.1 on IMDB.
But 25 years later, Point Break is still a stalwart on television, has spawned a goofy play adaptation, and remains one of the more quotable films from the 90s. For those who missed it in theaters, Point Break seemingly aired on all hours of the night on all channels both broadcast and cable for most of the 90s. Whether you had seven channels and an antenna, or were an early adopter of cable with a hundred, odds are you couldn’t avoid Point Break for long and when you did finally give in and watch, chances were you were going to have to re-watch it a few times just to fully wrap your head around all the wonderful and ridiculous chaos that unfolds.
Surfing, skydiving, bank robberies, shootouts, car chases, beach football, foot pursuits, and fights galore. The acting, the plot, and the dialogue consistently had moments that could make you cringe and write off the movie altogether. But even with not so subtle blemishes, Point Break’s absurdity, action, entertainment, and sheer novelty was enough to keep you transfixed deep into the night when it re-aired.
Even today, when asked if Point Break is a good movie, I don’t know how to answer that. What I can tell you is that I’ll drop almost anything to watch it as evidenced below. If you’re really cool, I might just end my email to you with “Vaya con Dios.”
You guys, Point Break is on Sundance channel. I pledge to always tell you when Point Break is on and ask for the same in return.
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) August 2, 2014
Best phone call one could get: "Hello" "Ben, I just saw Point Break Live is coming back to SF. I got tickets. U in?" http://t.co/cqjgfJzfvy
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) November 1, 2013
Wait , Point Break was on VH1 and none of you tweeted me? Not cool guys.
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) January 11, 2014
The millennial perspective from Alex Putterman
Point Break suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. It seems unable to decide whether it wants to be a good movie or a bad movie.
On one hand, it’s kind of unlike anything I’ve ever seen, with a cool integration of surfing culture into a crime thriller and all kinds of action sequences that defy the typical car-chase-shootout template (though there is a car chase and several shootouts). It features a tense skydiving fight, a dramatic chase through quaint suburban households, a guy almost getting his face torn apart by a lawn mover and a just-out-of-the-shower naked lady beating up FBI agents. The plot is innovative, the storyline flows well, the characters make sense. There is the outline of a great movie here.
But then they cast Keanu Reeves as the lead. Now maybe someone older and wiser than I am can explain Keanu Reeves to me, but I’m not sure I’ll ever understand his career. Someone really saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and thought, we need to make that guy into an action star?
In Point Break, Reeves delivers all his lines like the empty-brained hippie caricature he was most famous for playing. You could insert Mike Myers into this movie, call him Wayne Campbell, and nothing would change. The highlight of Point Break for me was watching Reeves try to deliver lines with emotional depth. One of the climactic lines comes in the final scene, when Johnny (Reeves) tells Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), “You gotta go down! It’s gotta be that way!” But instead of inching to the edge of seat, I started cracking up at how stiff the delivery was. The most natural-sounding line from Reeves was probably, “This was your lame-o idea in the first place,” because it felt right out of Bill and Ted.
Basically, if you’re trying to make a good movie, in 1991 or 2016, why would you cast Keanu Reeves?
The rest of the acting held up pretty well. Gary Busey was engaging, in a manic kind of way, and Lori Petty was pretty compelling, even as the token love interest who lacks much development and advances the plot mostly as a damsel in distress.
Overall, I enjoyed Point Break for its boldness and creativity. I’m not sure I would have predicted Kathryn Bigelow would re-emerge 15 years later to direct critically acclaimed, Academy Award-winning war dramas, but she clearly knew what she was doing here. The bad guys were a little more complex than most action-movie bad guys — motivated not by money or sheer evil, but by keeping the human spirit alive — which is hokey but at least different, and the action sequences were consistently entertaining.
It’s been 25 years since Point Break, and I’ve never seen anything like it (notwithstanding the 2015 remake, I guess). Even if the part I’ll remember most is Keanu Reeves attempting to say “Vaya con Dios.”
Final Millennial Review rating: 4/5 iPads.
Now let’s give out some superlatives:
Lamest sandwich order: When Angelo Pappas (Busey) sends Johnny to get his a meatball sub, Johnny orders for himself tuna on wheat. Tuna on wheat?!?! For our brave hero? Seriously? That’s what my grandmother would order (love you, nana). Hotshot quarterback-turned-FBI-agent Johnny Utah should be ordering corned beef or pastrami, or at least salami or something, preferably on rye or white. Anything but tuna on wheat.
Problem that could be most easily solved with Google: Johnny seduces his girl, Tyler, by pretending his parents died in a car crash. Given that he was a famous football player whose backstory had probably been written about plenty, Tyler would have been able to catch him in that lie pretty easily if only she had a search engine.
Line that feels most cringe-worthy in 2016: A couple scenes after shooting someone in the forehead, Angelo complains, “I had to kill a guy. And I hate that. It looks bad on my report,” which probably wouldn’t fly today amid outrage over police brutality. In fact, it might have sounded pretty bad even a year later amid the Rodney King riots. Cops joking about killing people is generally a bad look.
Best shirtless sports sequence: When I reviewed Top Gun back in January, I spent a solid amount of words analyzing the famed shirtless volleyball scene. So I was beyond thrilled to discover that while Point Break lacks volleyball, it does feature a (somewhat) shirtless football scene! Are shirtless sports scenes a requirement of movies made in the 80s and early-90s? I must have missed the shirtless lacrosse scene in Goodfellas. This is something worth watching for in future Millennial Reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWH-s8yGUE
