Point Break
Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron team for bodacious summer thriller
Video Days orders readers to surrender their badge and gun and while suspended for the month of May, return to ten films trafficking in law and order.
POINT BREAK (1991) is a summer entertainment soundly constructed in its story and exhilarating in its action sequences. The mystery is how it earned a reputation for being a guilty pleasure, even among viewers who have an honestly good time watching it. That might start with the fact that the film is a bromance between a Zen surfer (Patrick Swayze) and a robotic FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who seems to be missing a few microchips. The movie is similar to a riding lawnmower with a 1,000CC engine. Excessive, it not only delivers, it over-delivers.
Rick King attended prep school in Concord, New Hampshire. He studied history at Stanford University in the late 1960s, spending much of his time as a campus radical. Putting in stints working for consumer advocate Ralph Nader and political candidates, King ended up at MIT, where he fell under the instruction of documentary filmmaker Richard Reacock, distributor of the concert film Monterey Pop (1968). Editing promotional films and shooting documentaries led to King co-writing and directing an experimental mockumentary titled Off the Wall (1977) for $30,000. His crime film Hard Choices would screen at the Sundance Film Festival in 1985 and be ranked by Roger Ebert as one of the ten best films of 1986. Living in Los Angeles, King read a newspaper article highlighting the city’s reputation as the bank robbery capital of the world, its urban sprawl, freeways and large number of banks making it possible for skilled stickup men to strike and disappear. King was in Malibu learning to surf when he had an epiphany: surfers who rob banks are infiltrated by an athletic federal agent posing as a surfer. King thought of it as “Tom Cruise Joins the FBI.”
Needing a screenwriter, King’s agent Toby Jaffe–of Leading Artists before it merged with another agency to form United Talent Agency–paired him with W. Peter Iliff, a new client. Iliff was then working at a Greek restaurant in Santa Monica and began developing a script with King for him to direct. The screenwriter knew a waiter named Bodhi McCoy, inspiring him to not only name his bank robbing surfer Bodhi, but incorporate some of his co-worker’s philosophies. The FBI agent’s name–Johnny Utah–was a nod to Iliff’s favorite football player: Joe Montana. Iliff & King titled their script Johnny Utah. Johnny’s partner Angelo Pappas was Greek and culinary, like the restaurateur Iliff was employed by. Peter Abrams and Robert L. Levy–who’d produced King’s latest picture, The Killing Time (1987) starring Beau Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland–set Johnny Utah up at Columbia Pictures. The studio was more interested in the concept than Rick King, and knowing that director Ridley Scott was searching for contemporary material to follow his fantasy film Legend (1985) with, offered the directing job to Scott. To incorporate their suggestions as well as those by Scott, Columbia commissioned Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes, among others, to work on the script. Ready to get back to work, Scott chose another cop thriller at Columbia to direct next titled Someone To Watch Over Me (1987). The studio penciled in a December 1987 start date for Johnny Utah, with Scott directing Charlie Sheen in the title role. Preparing for Eight Men Out (1988) in batting practice with the L.A. Dodgers, Sheen pulled muscles in his shoulder which required surgery. Without a lead actor, Scott’s attention in Johnny Utah waned.
Columbia spent a couple of years attempting to resuscitate Johnny Utah until James Cameron expressed interest, not to direct, but to produce for his new wife, director Kathryn Bigelow. While he was prepping Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Cameron huddled with Bigelow to adapt Iliff’s script. Rather than the gang calling themselves the Dead Presidents (with Washington and Lincoln masks), they changed that to the Ex-Presidents, like Nixon and Reagan. Johnny nearly getting fed to a lawnmower during the police raid was a Cameron contribution, as was the skydiving sequence with Johnny leaping out of the plane without a parachute. Columbia didn’t know what to make of Bigelow’s preference to cast Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah. Though building a body of work in films like River’s Edge (1987), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Parenthood (1989), Reeves had never been seen playing anything but a teenage zoner. Columbia lost confidence and put the project in turnaround. Cameron contacted Lawrence Gordon, former president of Twentieth Century Fox, who was launching a new company called Largo Entertainment as a joint venture with Japanese consumer electronics giant JVC. Largo paid Columbia their development costs and, acquiring the script, raised a reported production budget of $24 million for what was now titled Riders on the Storm. Largo’s president Joseph Newton Cohen stepped in to produce the film with Abrams and Levy, with James Cameron taking an executive producer credit.
Sharing top billing with Keanu Reeves was Patrick Swayze as Bodhi. Gary Busey was cast as Pappas and against type, Lori Petty as Johnny’s surfing contact and lover, Tyler Endicott. Rather than a Californian blonde, Petty was dark and quirky, with fluid sexuality to match Reeves’. Shooting commenced in Los Angeles in July 1990 four days before the release of Ghost (1990), a sleeper that began its climb up the box office charts to become the highest grossing film of the summer and garner Swayze the title of “Sexiest Man Alive,” according to the authority, People magazine. The beach where Johnny buys his first board, tests the waters and meets Tyler was shot at Manhattan Beach Pier. The spot where Johnny gets jumped by surf Nazis was filmed at Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu. Most of the surfing sequences were shot in Hawaii, along the North Shore of Oahu. The skydiving sequence was choreographed above and atop Lake Powell in Utah, while for the final scene, the rocky coastline of Cannon Beach, Oregon stood in for Bells Beach in Australia. Banks in Santa Monica and Culver City were used to film the robbery scenes, with the foot chase also shot in Culver City, Johnny ending up in Ballona Creek firing his service weapon in the air and yelling.
With Fox providing distribution, what was by now titled Point Break opened a week after Terminator 2 in July 1991 on 1,615 screens in the U.S. Reviews fell short of the accolades piling up for T2, but leaned positive. Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert split. Siskel acknowledged the picture wasn’t bad but couldn't recommend it, finding Point Break “overstuffed” with more than one false ending. Ebert praised the film as “a surprisingly intelligent and effective thriller” and really liked the action scenes. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin was again effusive with praise for Kathryn Bigelow, lauding her “as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action” jolting the viewer awake whenever the film’s flakiness threatened to become too much. Whereas Bigelow’s three previous features–The Loveless (1984), Near Dark (1987), and Blue Steel (1990)--hadn’t made a dime, Point Break was modestly successful at the box office, spending only three weeks among the top ten grossing films in the country but sticking with most of those who saw it, whether in a theater or on videocassette. The movie’s reputation seemed to blossom with each new viewer until in 2003, Point Break Live! debuted in Seattle, a stage parody that sent up the film’s silliness and celebrated its awesomeness, playing in over a dozen U.S. cities since.
It’s a credit to Kathryn Bigelow that by the time Keanu Reeves was cast as an intrepid SWAT commando in the action thriller Speed (1994) nobody in the film industry protested. Point Break gets fascinating to unpack where Reeves and his performance are concerned. The script (the WGA awarded screenplay credit to W. Peter Iliff, story to Rick King & Iliff) doesn’t give Johnny Utah a fiber of credibility as an FBI agent. The theory that the Ex-Presidents are surfers comes from Pappas, not from Utah or any thought in his head. Johnny’s qualifications as a field agent seem to be his ability to pass himself off for who he is, a goofball no one could mistake for law enforcement. This is a quality that The Fast and the Furious (2001) mimicked by casting Paul Walker as an undercover cop infiltrating not Southern California surfing culture, but street racing culture. As hysterically funny as some of Reeves’ line readings (“I Am An FBI Agent!” to Swayze’s character before they jump out of the plane), Bigelow, raised in Southern California, seems to have recognized how vital surfing was to her film. She cast a credible surfer first and FBI agent second rather than the other way around.
Reeves’ doofiness brushes off easily in the shadow of a kinetically paced action film that offers a surprisingly sturdy hook. Rick King’s conceit of bank robbing surfers–conducting quick stick-ups in the summer to finance their nomadic lifestyle the rest of the year and sticking it to the Man at the same time–is a lot more plausible than it needed to be. Donald Peterman, a solid commercial cinematographer whose work on the drama American Flyers (1985) about professional cyclists might have gotten the filmmakers’ attention, lends the film a glossy, Sports Illustrated look, which the editing reinforces during the action sequences. The surfing or skydiving are mesmerizing, conveying the allure of an adrenaline-fueled lifestyle for those of us without that adrenaline. Rather than giving these scenes a frenetic or gritty edge, Bigelow and her second unit director/ stunt coordinator Glenn Wilder give the sports a placid, dreamlike quality that serves as a contrast to the chaos of the bank robberies. Bigelow goes for broke with a fantastic foot chase through the yards and houses of Santa Monica that propels the viewer right into the action. The line between comedy and action sometimes blurs–the film was also ribbed by filmmaker Edgar Wright a few times in Hot Fuzz (2007)–but that’s a sacrifice Cameron seemed willing to make, knowing Bigelow’s movie was coming out the summer of T2 and didn’t need to be darker or more psychological, but juiced.
Video rental category: Action/ Adventure
Special interest: Forever Summer