edical science may yet unearth a way to make Keanu Reeves lose his cool, but it hasn’t happened yet. When the actor was asked in a recent interview about the coming remake of his surfer-crime thriller Point Break, it was like someone had slotted a disc marked ‘magnanimity’ into his Matrix control panel.
“Maybe when things become classics, they’re open to modern-day interpretation,” he said. “So hopefully, their interpretation of this classic will be cool.”
Reeves’s optimism was heartening. It also put him in a minority of one. When news of the remake first broke in 2011, the wider reaction was more or less universal dismay. Petitions were mounted, and angry commentaries were penned. Meanwhile on Film Twitter, the fires burnt long into the night.
Warner Bros must have been taken aback by the level of vitriol directed towards the project. The original Point Break, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and released in 1991, certainly qualified as a cult favourite. Nut to anyone looking at the statistics alone, Reeves’s description of it as a classic wouldn’t compute.
On its original release, it had been a modest box office success, though critics largely dismissed it (“macho claptrap”, harrumphed the Sight & Sound review). And unlike many of its contemporaries, including Mission: Impossible, Bad Boys, and Reeves’s own Speed, it hadn’t spawned a sequel.
But this unforeseen outpouring of love proved Bigelow’s film had struck a chord after all – and one that has been reverberating round Hollywood ever since. Point Break is arguably the most vital action film of the early 1990s: more important even than Terminator 2 in redefining where the genre could go and what it could do. What’s more, it took a woman director and a 26-year-old pretty-boy to knock this most meat-headed of entertainments into shape.
Bigelow didn’t get her hands on Point Break until long after the script had been bought by Columbia Pictures. The original screenplay, called Johnny Utah, was written by W. Peter Iliff, a waiter and self-styled ‘beach bum’ who dreamt up a tale about an FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of bank-robbing surfers.
It was 1986, and Ridley Scott was to direct, with Matthew Broderick in the Johnny Utah role andCharlie Sheen as the surf guru-stroke-ringleader Bodhi. And you can just about picture the result as being Ridley’s more crumpled answer to his brother Tony Scott’s Top Gun, released that summer.
That production fell through, and four years passed before Iliff’s script found its way to Bigelow via her then-husband James Cameron, who was keen to produce. The then-34-year-old Cameron was hot stuff: his previous film, Aliens, had been an international smash, and his current project, The Abyss, in which an alien species brings water itself to life, was pushing digital effects forward in previously unthinkable ways.
But it was the 36-year-old Bigelow who was the radical. Her two previous features had each hungrily pulled apart their respective genres like cheese strings. Near Dark was a vampire drama in which the woman is the glamorous undead seducer and a young man the innocent target, while Blue Steel reinvented scream queen and comedienne Jamie Lee Curtis as a driven New York cop.
For one of the few female directors working in Hollywood to take on a film built entirely on the relationship between two men was unexpected. But Point Break turned out to be Bigelow’s most subversive film yet. She and Cameron quietly reworked the script, and delivered her one non-negotiable demand to the producers. Keanu Reeves – then known as the goofy-hot young star of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and not much else – would be her leading man.
To say this didn’t quite fall in step with received wisdom is understating it. For more than a decade, action heroes had been glistening American dreams of domination, endlessly re-fighting the Vietnam War on screen and winning. But by the late 1980s, the public appetite for these one-man armies was waning. In 1987, the British high-street art shop Athena launched a poster called L’Enfant: a black-and-white photograph of a shirtless man cradling a baby. It sold five million copies. Softness was back in fashion.
Arnold Schwarzenegger knew it: that’s why, in 1989, the actor went straight from Total Recall to Kindergarten Cop. And so did Bigelow. Johnny Utah was as all-American as heroes come: a jock turned lawman, with a name inspired by the legendary quarterback Joe Montana.
But played by Reeves, he was more beautiful than handsome, with a puppyish charm, and a poignant awareness of his own emotional blind spots. Take the scene in which Johnny struggles to put his feelings into words on his girlfriend’s answerphone. “F- - -, why can’t I ever say what I really mean?” he tearfully laments. It’s hard to picture Rambo doing that.
Reeves was something new. But his better-known co-star was just as unexpected. In the role of Bodhi, Patrick Swayze was at ease with action. But cinema-goers knew him best as an attentive lover: he was Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing and Demi Moore’s phantom boyfriend in Ghost. If you needed someone to fondle wet clay, Swayze was your man – and Bigelow’s camera caresses both him and Reeves just as tenderly. The director once described Point Break as a “wet western”: feel free to unpack that particular turn of phrase at your leisure.
Of course, the camera also ogles Lori Petty, who plays the gorgeous female surfer Tyler. But her toned, androgynous body, cropped dark hair and unisex name are all conspicuously at odds with the blonde, booby bombshells of Baywatch, which began its original ten-year run while Point Break was in production. (Iliff’s original script paired Johnny with a more stereotypical California girl. Tyler was a Bigelow creation.)
What’s more, the male-on-female perving is staged as a groan-worthy gag. Johnny is all but tripping over his tongue as he spies on Tyler through binoculars while she changes out of her swimsuit. The film’s admiration for Reeves’ and Swayze’s bodies, on the other hand, is subtler – and coded into every shot. Look out, for instance, for the almost indiscernible drop into slow-motion in the sequence where Johnny showers at the beach: it’s one of the stealthiest phwoars in modern cinema.
It’s unlikely that a male director would have had the nerve for this – or that two more established male stars, with hard-won hard-man reputations to defend, would have thrown themselves into it with quite so much gusto. In a promotional interview, Swayze described the film as being miles from “slap-ass, macho, jokey crap…I wanted to play it like a love story between two men.” In 80s action movies, the male body is a weapon of war. Point Breakturns it into a source of pleasure.
And pleasure is what Point Break’s leads are chasing. Whether surfing, skydiving, playing American football or robbing banks in rubber masks, it’s all in pursuit of what Tyler purringly calls “the ultimate ride”: a thrill so big it recalibrates your worldview.
“This was never about money for us!” runs Bodhi’s big, pre-robbery motivational speech. “It was about us against the system – the system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human spirit is still alive.” Bodhi’s technically the bad guy, but Bigelow makes sure you’d rather hang out with him than the ranting throwbacks at the Bureau. The clear moral line in the sand that 80s action films had toed so tirelessly was being washed away.
Point Break’s most haunting shot thumbs its nose at the past decade’s political order in style. Just before the film’s astonishing central foot chase, Bodhi, still wearing his rubber Ronald Reagan mask, torches the gang’s getaway car with a flamethrower improvised from a nearby petrol pump. Bigelow films him through the rippling heat haze – a grasping, grinning gargoyle setting the suburbs alight.
This stuff was so revolutionary that Hollywood took almost a decade to catch up. In some respects, Point Break’s effect on pop culture was immediate: it brought extreme sports into the mainstream and made Reeves the 1990s’ defining action star, just as Bigelow predicted. But it was only ten years later, with the success of The Fast and the Furious – a car-based Point Break remake in all but name – that brotherly love and beautiful men had become ingrained in action-movie culture.
These days, you can hardly move for both. Every superhero has a sensitive side, every man-hug a spicy subtext. Staring into the ocean from a rain-lashed shore, Bodhi saw it coming. Twenty-five years later, he and Johnny are part of film history – but their search for the ultimate ride lives on.
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