Point Break

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weeks is Point Break. Unfortunately, it seems to have migrated to the commercial channels now, but it's easy enough to find on DVD and whatever your favorite streaming service is.

Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, a former college football player who couldn't make the pros because he blew out his knee. So he decided to join the FBI instead. He's recently finished up his training at Quantico, and is sent off to the field in Los Angeles. There, his supervisor Harp (John McGinley) doesn't like any of the new recruits, belittling them at every opportunity. Johnny gets paired with Pappas (Gary Busey), an older agent who could probably retire to desk duty fairly soon, and is also not particularly liked by Harp because he's rather unorthodox.

That independent thinking is driving Harp nuts on the current case the FBI is working on. There's a group of bank robbers that have been comming a series of heists every summer. The men are dressed in masks of former presidents of the United States, leading the gang to be called the Ex-Presidents. Because the robberies only seem to take place during the summer, Pappas has the odd hunch that the Ex-Presidents are a group of surfers who go around the world looking for the perfect wave, using those robberies during the season while they're in California to fund their travels. Pappas figures that he's too old to take up surfing and infiltrate the gang, but perhaps now that he's got a young buck of a partner, Johnny could learn to surf.

And so Johnny agrees to try to learn surfing. But it's a very insular community, and they don't necessarily take well to newcomers since they're also very territorial. Johnny buys a surfboard from Tyler (Lori Petty), and it's already clear he knows nothing about the sport. But eventually one of the leaders of the surfers, Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), recognizes Johnny from his college football days, not having heard that Johnny wound up joining the FBI. Johnny is able to get close to Bodhi and his friends, and we'll find out whether any of them are the Ex-Presidents.

Well, there's one other complication. Some of the surfers are into smuggling drugs. Johnny finds out about this at a party, and gets the FBI to agree to raid the place since, after all, he is supposed to be making certain crime is snuffed out. But that's one of the things that's likely to blow Johnny's cover.

Then again, it's likely to get blown in other ways. Johnny has fallen in love with Tyler, even though she was also in a relationship with Bodhi in the past. She goes through his stuff and finds his FBI identification, which is a serious problem, especially since it occurs little more than halfway through the movie.

Point Break is one of those movies that's a lot of fun, just because the premise is so nuts that you can't take it seriously. It's supposed to be a relatively serious action/drama movie, at least in the sense that it wasn't conceived as a comedy. But the dialog is terrible, and the amount of suspension of disbelief required is such that the movie turns into an unintentional comedy.

Amazingly, Gary Busey received an Oscar nomination back in the 1970s for playing the title role in The Buddy Holly Story. But that was before his serious motorcycle crash, a few years before Point Break. Here, Busey seems to be a parody of a serious actor. Keanu was never much of an actor for anything other than action movies. Expecting him to show emotion here is a stretch. And the plot has all sorts of holes.

So just sit back and don't pay too much attention to reality, and have a lot of fun watching Point Break.