![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “It’s a state of mind” muses Bodhi, a virtue that cuts across his world of criminal underpinning, a thrill-a-minute high that’s more of a game against the system than a necessity. Short for Bodhisattva, a Buddhist term for anyone who refrains from Enlightenment in order to guide others, Bodhi acts as the gang’s clandestine leader a deity among the surfers who taps into the spiritual side of the sea in order to feel a deeper connection. The charismatic and ruggedly disarming leader of the film’s bank robbers – surfers who don the synthetic masks of Ex-Presidents – is Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), an unshorn guru to the waves whose own moniker is as duplicitous as it is righteous. Where action can easily be equated to brute strength, or at the very least, the power of what’s pointed at the screen. A deeply resonant portrait of machismo put to extremes, tested between the action genre and the buddy cop film that superbly bends tropes that have been injected into the veins of anyone who grew up in the previous decade overdosing on testosterone. A powerful force to be reckoned with that, more than the caliber of any rifle, deserves to be respected, except it’s so much more. Opening atop the sun licked waves as a surfer paddles out, Point Break is undeniably a surf film, about the state of existing amongst the expanse of nature that at any moment can consume us. Point Break, cutting across the crest of its own bravado, is that rare exception a sand dusted snow globe of brotherhood, bullets and beaches, whose action is rooted in finding life’s waves of riding for as long as the summer sun suspends itself against the chase, one whose ultimately melancholic destination places Point Break as Kathryn Bigelow’s best film. She’s a relative newcomer – with only two solo features under her belt, the criminally undervalued Blue Steel and the nocturnally romantic Near Dark – who is more concerned with uncovering the harmony that lies in between the cracks of cinema’s cache of heist films a genre that often fills space with aimless testosterone and hopped up shootouts. ![]() While most directors would relish the barrel of a loaded gun, Bigelow seems to cherish the hands that hold it, encapsulating Point Break with as much self-discovery and longing as there is jocular surf slang. Alternative drugs that are mainlined in the form of a stoical meditation on existing against the system, caught on the tide of an action film where its greatest moments are captured not riding the wave, but feeling the motion of its waters. But every wave has a breaking point, and right before it crashes against the rocks under the sweltering sun, there’s nothing but adrenaline and euphoria. For a particular band of masked bank robbers in Kathryn Bigelow’s sublimely gripping Point Break, this surf transcends the iridescent waves of the ocean to stacks of unmarked bills where under perfect conditions – out in under 90 seconds and never risking the vault – the banks of the greater Los Angeles area, the bank robbery capital of the world in the face of the FBI, can be ridden all summer long. For surfers, and only under perfect conditions, this creates a swell that can be ridden for an extensive period of time. Point break: the spot where a wave crashes as it hits an area of land protruding from the coastline. ![]()
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