It’s no secret that Keanu Reeves is one of our best movie stars. Whether he’s gunning his way through a neon-soaked criminal underworld, kung-fu-ing devious computer constructs, or shredding on an air guitar, Reeves is a big-screen icon.
Now, one of his greatest movies – and a bonafide cult classic – has finally returned to UK cinemas, 33 years after its original release, thanks to the BFI’s Art of Action season. This film often gets overlooked in the noise of such a legendary Hollywood career (and that’s maybe not a huge surprise, since, with over 100 acting credits to Reeves’ name, there’s a lot to talk about). But with a scene-stealing Patrick Swayze, high-adrenaline sports, and homoerotic tension for the ages, this is one of the best Keanu Reeves movies of all time.
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I’m talking, of course, about Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. Reeves plays a rookie FBI agent in sunny California on the trail of a group of surfers moonlighting as bank robbers. From the set-up, then, you’d think Point Break is a straightforward heist movie. It’s anything but. Point Break is many things: a staple of ’90s cinema, a beautifully shot examination of adrenaline and obsession, a tale of a doomed, intensely masculine relationship between a criminal and the man tasked to bring him to justice.
Ride the wave
Reeves’s Johnny was a quarterback until an injury derailed his career, which means he’s already primed to fall under the spell of Swayze’s charismatic Bodhi, leader of the bank robbers. To catch the criminals – known as the Ex-Presidents, since they wear masks of former presidents – Johnny goes undercover as a surfer in California. While at first he can’t quite get the hang of it, almost drowning until he’s saved by Lori Petty’s Tyler, whom he later strikes up a relationship with, he eventually manages to join Bodhi’s surfing crew. Bodhi lives life on the edge, a way of being that’s intimately familiar to a former sports star, though Bodhi goes to far greater extremes.
Johnny is inexorably drawn to Bodhi and his intense philosophy, captivated by the rush of a high-adrenaline life. “We stand for something,” Bodhi says at one point in the movie. “To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human spirit is still alive.” Nowhere is that feeling better captured in the movie than when the Ex-Presidents and Johnny go sky-diving, soaring through the air, spinning and backflipping, grins blazing on their faces, hands triumphantly clasped. The scene is so beautiful you feel like you’re floating through the air with them, and, for a moment, you think: I get it.
Point Break is a cat-and-mouse story in the strangest way, then, since the cat finds himself hypnotized by the mouse. Johnny can’t bring himself to bring Bodhi in even when he has the man literally in his sights, shooting the sky and screaming in abject frustration. Bodhi reawakens the human spirit within Johnny, luring him from his metal coffin, his office, his regular life. “I know you want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth,” Bodhi tells Johnny late in the movie, one of many examples of the moments their relationship dances on the line between cop vs. criminal, friend vs. friend, and something deeper and more complicated: Johnny’s yearning for the freedom of the adrenaline-fuelled life made flesh.
Where the wave meets land
Ultimately, though, disaster has to strike in Point Break. Things come to a fittingly intense, dramatic conclusion in a rain-soaked showdown by the waves. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil the conclusion here – but for those who have, you’ll know that things could never have ended another way.
With Point Break back in cinemas now, the opportunity is there to reawaken your own human spirit – to take the plunge from the plane (metaphorically speaking, of course) and (re-)experience one of the great Reeves movies the way it should be seen: on a big screen in a packed cinema. Vaya con dios.
Point Break is in cinemas now. You can fill out your watchlist with our guides on 2024’s most exciting remaining upcoming movies or the best Keanu Reeves movies.