Utah's brilliant plan is to infiltrate the gang and figure out where they are heading next - most of his superiors think his idea is silly but since he already has the necessary hair, his boss ( Delroy Lindo) lets him pursue it. Considering that Ono himself supposedly died during the third challenge, you can tell how impressed Mother Nature is by this. Putting two and two together and coming up with "Dude," Utah figures out that the perpetrators are fellow extreme athletes whose trail of crime parallels the infamous Ozaki Eight - a collection of eight extreme (needless to say, the word "extreme" is used a lot here) challenges spanning the globe devised by environmental activist Ozaki Ono to honor the beauty and power of Mother Nature while still looking like a refugee from an old Mountain Dew commercial. For his first case, he is assigned to investigate a pair of strange heists in Mumbai and Mexico in which massive American conglomerates are robbed by people whose heists are accompanied by wild stunts (such as motorcycling off of the upper floors of skyscrapers and parachuting to safety - don't ask about what happens to the bikes themselves) and who appear to distribute their ill-gotten gains to the poor. Once again, our hero is Johnny Utah ( Luke Bracey), an extreme sports enthusiast who suffered a great tragedy - one that plays more like a spoof of the opening of " Cliffhanger" than anything else - that inspires him to quit the sport and become an F.B.I.
25 years later, we have now been blessed with a "Point Break" remake that is completely lacking in any of the visceral thrills or apparent charisma of the original and which could not be duller if it tried. To be fair, it was dumb but it certainly wasn't boring and director Kathryn Bigelow (who would go on to make such great films as " Strange Days" and " The Hurt Locker") handled the action sequences in such a visually arresting manner (especially in an extraordinary mid-film chase scene through a residential neighborhood that is still stunning to watch) that there were times when you could almost convince yourself to forget that the rest of the film was a preposterous mess. After all, the film in which callow FBI agent Johnny Utah ( Keanu Reeves) infiltrated a group of bank-robbing surfers led by the enigmatic and Zen-spouting Bodhi ( Patrick Swayze) in order to bring them down-was an aggressively stupid film back then and time has not exactly done it any favors. Since making its debut in the summer of 1991, the action film "Point Break" has developed a cult following that I continue to be at a loss at fully explaining.
0 kommentar(er)
