It is self-serious at all times, espousing a strange GoPro-era extreme sports spirituality that contradicts itself as it writes checks it can't cash. This new Point Break, helmed by Ericson Core, cinematographer on the original Fast & Furious, can't even manage that. It acknowledged its ridiculousness via every character on the side of "law and order," while still treating the material with respect. The original Point Break's premise wasn't smart - an FBI agent learns to surf in order to discover the identity of a team of bank robbers operating in Los Angeles - but it was self-aware. This makes sense, because Johnny is himself a former extreme sports athlete who quit that world after a completely preventable and agonizingly stupid personal tragedy to join an FBI that was, apparently, totally cool with a legendarily irresponsible late 20-something as an applicant. The plot has a similar arc to the original - an FBI agent named Johnny (Luke Bracey) infiltrates a tight-knit group of extreme sports athletes on a hunch that they're responsible for a series of daring, global, public robberies. We'll stop there with the mitigation, though, because Point Break is a disaster. Point Break wasn't primed for re-mining, exactly, but the movie has found a recent second life in Rocky Horror-style theatre screenings and post-ironic appreciation in movies like Hot Fuzz, so it isn't exactly surprising that a remake is here. Even last year's reboot of Robocop wasn't completely without worth, offering some fairly pointed allegory toward combat wounded and post traumatic stress. Zack Snyder, love him or hate him, took one of the most beloved horror movies of all time and made something fierce and distinctive with Dawn of the Dead. Some of the best genre movies of all time have been remakes - Carpenter's take on The Thing is rightfully considered a classic, as is Cronenberg's reimagining of The Fly. Sheesh, can’t they just organise a barn dance in aid of the RSPB? Édgar Ramírez plays the gang’s preening leader, motivating them to do super-dangerous stuff, the primary danger in some cases being that the digital effects are visible.It's worth starting off by saying that Point Break (2015) didn't need to work especially hard to justify its existence, at least with me.ĭespite the internet hand-wringing, remakes do not have to be bad. They steal money to give to the poor (sort of) but are basically on a Zen mission to do all this radical show-off stuff as a tribute to capital-N Nature. He plays Utah, the extreme-sports fanatic turned undercover FBI agent who infiltrates a super-cool crew of extreme-sportsy people who rob stuff and then ride their bikes off the top of skyscrapers and pull the ripcords on their parachutes. Luke Bracey is Zoolanderishly good-looking, sporting plenty of transfer-tattoos and as supple and expressive as a surfboard. Hey: what if we could turn all those YouTube hits on extreme sports action into box office cash? What if we did a new version of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 action movie about a bank-robbing surfer gang, widened it to include loads of other extreme sports and made it pompously eco-conscious? These are the questions that evidently triggered this fantastically pointless remake, stuffed with humourless and self-important machismo.
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