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POINT BREAK
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By all rights, I should hate 1991's Point Break: it stars 2 ½ of the worst actors ever: Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, and Patrick Swayze (he gets the ½). The premise is beyond absurd. The story line is beyond implausible. The action beggars belief. The putative philosophy is a travesty. The dialog is over-the-top cliché:
Pappas: Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin' shrapnel in Khe Sanh when you were crappin' in your hands and rubbin' it on your face.
Yet whenever it's on (part of that endless TNT trash recycle loop), I find myself peeping at it with guilty pleasure, and I've finally cracked why. Like a multiply-overpainted Renaissance masterpiece now serving as a pub's swinging signboard, underneath all that blather is one of the most profound of bildungsroman messages: actions have consequences. As delivered with clodhopper intonation by the immortal Reaves:
Johnny Utah: [to Bodhi] You done wrong. You gotta pay. You crossed the line. People trusted you and they died. You gotta go down.
I swear each of those emphases is absolutely in the original speech.
[Warning: complete plot spoilers follow. Not that you'd be surprised by any of them.]
The film opens with a smash-and-grab robbery by the Ex-Presidents, a rubber-mask-wearing, tattered-tailcoat-flapping, white-glove-machine-gun-toting quartet who strike only in summer, then disappear for eight months, never leaving a clue.
Except one: a smidgen of Sex Wax from their most recent crime scene points directly to the hypothesis that they are … surfers who follow the waves around the globe. In full Sherlock-CSI style, grains of sand from the magic Sex Wax pinpoints a particular Malibu beach.
Sooooooooo, FBI supervisor Gary Busey (Under Siege) assigns fresh-grad Special Agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves,¸River's Edge), former Ohio State Buckeye quarterback before he tore up his knee, to go undercover for several months, as a surfer dude infiltrating the beach-bonfire-testosterone crowd. As Busey's supervisor grills him:
Ben Harp: Do you think that taxpayers would like it Utah, if they knew that they were paying a federal agent to surf and pick up girls?
Johnny Utah: Babes.
Ben Harp: I beg your pardon?
Johnny Utah: The correct term is babes, sir.
This cheekiness disguises an inner seriousness of purpose; in fact Johnny Utah is doing his job. He is also a surfer with integrity, as demonstrated in a fight scene where he is rescued by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze, Ghost) nicknamed from Bodhidharma because the surf crowd sees him as the Enlightened One. Johnny quickly becomes Bodhi's favored disciple as Bodhi expresses his own unique version of tumescent Zen:
Bodhi: If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It's not tragic to die doing what you love.
To our shock (what, you're not surprised?), we discover that Bodhi is the Ex-Presidents' ringleader (O no!), who robs as a kind of transcendental performance art:
Bodhi: What's the matter with you guys? This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. We are here to show those guys that are inching their way on the freeways in their metal coffins that the human sprit is still alive.
Bodhi then justifies his assaults with the no-one-gets-hurt defense characteristic of an impetuous child:
Bodhi: It's basic dog psychology, if you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit. But if you project weakness, that promotes violence, and that's how people get hurt.
There's a surf-babe involved (Lori Petty, Tank Girl), but for movie purposes she is basically a dominance token among the men, migrating from Bodhi to Johnny, leading to Johnny confronting Bodhi with the shocking news:
Johnny Utah: I'm an eff … bee … EYE Agent!
Yet Bodhi is unfazed. In another astonishing plot twist, Bodhi has known this and already taken Tyler hostage to force Johnny to participate in their next bank job, displaying the corruption of rationalization:
Bodhi: I hate this Johnny. I really do. I hate violence. That is why I had Rosie do this, I could never do that man, I could never hold a knife to Tyler's throat, she was my woman. But, Rosie, he's like a mechanism. He's got this gift of blankness. Once you set him an emotion, he will not stop. So, when three o'clock comes, he will gut her like a pig, and try not to get any on his shoes and there is nothing I can do.
[Part of my guilty pleasure in this film, I now realize, is the symbiosis between bad acting and bad dialog. Give that speech to Tommy Lee Jones and he could not possibly do it without conveying his actorly wry disgust for the words he must spout. But Swayze lives for dialog such as this and the result is a fusion of shallow acting conveying shallow character through shallow dialog.]
Now Johnny makes a choice that, however romantic, is at least adult in its acceptance of consequences:
Johnny Utah: You gotta tell me where she is.
Bodhi: Oh yeah, and let my policy expire. Good idea.
Johnny Utah: You gotta death wish. You want to ride to glory, fine. But don't take Tyler with you. I'm begging you. Tell me where she is, and I walk away.
Bodhi: You walk away?
Johnny Utah: I walk away.
Bodhi: That's beautiful Johnny.
Escape ensues but Johnny rescues Tyler. Yet he has sworn vengeance: after a lapse of four years of story time, thirty seconds of screen time:
Johnny Utah: I've been to every city in Mexico. I came across an unclaimed piece of meat in Baja, turned out to be Rosie. I guessed he picked a knife fight with somebody better. Found one of your passports in Sumatra. Missed you by about a week at Fiji. But I knew you wouldn't miss the fifty year storm, Bodhi.
Now the price must be paid, and Bodhi pays it, trading his life for one last, biggest, ultimate wave:
Australian cop: We'll get him when he comes back.
Johnny Utah: He's not coming back.
So the story arc is all there, encounter, evolution, enlightenment, choice, consequence: Heaven and Hell the ultimate destinations for two kindred spirits, one of whom chose to mature, the other to die. A powerful and satisfying story.
Pity about the acting … the plot … the premise … the dialog ….