Point Break (2015)

Point Break (*)

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 113 minutes

Director Ericson Core

Cast: Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Delroy Lindo and Ray Winstone

Movie House Cinemas preview screening, Dublin Road, 01/02/2016

I believe that like me, the people behind these robberies are extreme athletes, using their skills to disrupt the international financial market. And they don’t care who gets killed in the process.

SOMETIMES when you’re at the cinema, sitting in your seat while the closing credits roll down the screen you find yourself thinking: “why the hell did I ever bother watching this?’ Well that’s exactly how I felt after sitting through Ericson Core’s 3D remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, a two-hour snooze-fest that somehow manages to make an action movie with a globe-trotting plot and elaborate set pieces boring as hell.

Much like in the original the film’s plot sees rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey), going undercover within a group of extreme-sports athletes who his superiors believe are responsible for a series of daring robberies. Once undercover he soon develops a complex friendship with the group’s leader Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez), who reveals his groups true intentions; gone are the Ex-Presidents and in their place is a group of adrenaline junkie Eco-terrorists, carrying out these extreme ordeals as they search for nirvana and seek to honour the forces of nature…..yeap you read that right!

The obvious question that needs to be asked is whether we really needed a remake of Bigelow’s feature in the first place? If your answer isn’t no, then I’d strongly recommend you stop reading this review and go back and re-watch her 1991 feature before venturing any further. Much like Die Hard it’s a fantastic action movie that’s stood the test of time and has only improved with age; anyway we’ve already had a pseudo Point Break remake in 2001 with The Fast and the Furious. Like so many of Bigelow’s other films it captured the clash of masculinity onscreen between its two central characters near perfectly.

The film’s first problem, of which there are plenty I assure you, is that it lacks any real star power for a theatrical release; I’d hardly consider Édgar Ramírez and Luke Bracey to be A-list talent, the biggest name within the film’s cast list is probably Ray Winstone, and the British actor gives the kind of performance you’d expect, yeap he’s pretty much just being Ray Winstone throughout the movie.

The lack of star power is really the least of the film’s problems though, because the screenplay is simply terrible and I mean terrible. Written by Equilibrium’s Kurt Wimmer, the dialogue is tedious and clunky, it’s full of needless  exposition and really only exists to move the narrative from one elaborate set-piece to another, which are really the film’s only real saving grace.

The director who was also the film’s cinematographer, claimed he wanted to make these sequences as realistic as possible and there’s some great camerawork particularly for the skydiving and base-jumping scenes, but no matter how adrenaline filled these set-pieces might be, when you just don’t care for any of the characters involved there’s simply no peril involved whatsoever.

In Bigelow’s original it genuinely felt like Keanu Reeves’ character was being drawn into the criminal lifestyle whilst he was undercover, swayed by Patrick Swayze‘s charismatic character and his attempts to rebel against the system. This time round though it feels more like Brokeback Mountain with enough repressed homosexuality onscreen between the two leads to rival even Top Gun. It means when they replicate the original’s iconic scene, where Utah cannot bring himself to shoot Bodhi and instead unloads his magazine into the sky; it’s just too cheesy and laugh out loud silly.

So if you like the original Point Break, why on earth would you waste your money going to go see this lousy remake, especially a 3D one? My advice is to either hoke out the original on DVD and give it another viewing, or if you’ve never seen Bigelow’s feature spend your money on getting a copy of that instead ,rather than wasting it on a cinema ticket for this pointless remake.

Review by Jim McClean (@legacurrylad)
Review by Jim McClean (@legacurrylad)

 

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.