![]() ![]() While any remake looks to stand apart from the original property on its own merit, Point Break makes so many direct nods to its predecessor that it's disingenuous to consider them distinct from one another. Edgar Ramirez does the best he can with the character, and leaves the movie with a better performance than Bracey's Utah or Teresa Palmer's incredibly underwritten love interest Samsara. Point Break has an excuse to travel around the world by incorporating the Eight Ordeals mythology in, but turning Bodhi into a Robin Hood-like figure with a radical view on how he can save the entire world (yes, the stakes are really that high) makes him at first empathetic and later just a nutjob. ![]() Here Bodhi is a criminal mastermind with all the money in the world at his disposal and a proficiency at multiple extreme sports. Everything is bigger in this new take on the story, and because of that even some of the characters question why exactly everything is larger-than-life. The stakes are relatively small in Bigelow's Point Break, with Bodhi and his gang robbing banks and surfing, and Johnny Utah out to stop them but getting in over his head. It's when the movie tries to rationalize why each of these sequences is important that the film falls apart, because even it seems self-aware that the story doesn't make much sense. Each of the Ordeals is supposed to be a near-impossible feat, so watching the scenes where real people are snow boarding down incredibly steep mountains or flying wingsuits through dangerous valleys or swinging up the side of a massive cliff face keeps you on the edge of your seat. If Point Break couldn't get the chemistry between Utah and Bodhi better than the original film did and its bigger story is ultimately weaker than its predecessor, it can at least be said that the stunt sequences are much better. It's from there that Point Break blows out its scale as Utah travels around the world with Bodhi and his gang to get on the inside as they perform the various ordeals in incredible vistas.įor the most part, the stunts performed in the film are real, and those extreme sports sequences are the best part of the movie. Despite being a motocross expert, Utah gets in the water without preparation (as he explains to Ray Winstone's Angelo Pappas, he's surfed before) and earns the attention and respect of Edgar Ramirez's Bodhi. The FBI gives Utah a chance to test out his theory, and he determines that the next place the terrorists will be is at a huge wave off the coast of France. But by making the motivations of Bodhi so convoluted, Point Break fails to stick the pro-green point it seems to so earnestly be trying to make. Ultimately it's an excuse to do cool stunts around the world, and an excuse to parallel the surfer journey of Bodhi and Utah in the original. This eight ordeals concept is at the core of Point Break, though the film is never really consistent with it. Utah realizes that the eco-terrorists' heists coincide with the seemingly impossible Ozaki 8 challenge, through which the person who completes each trial will apparently achieve Nirvana. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |