By comparison, Reeves bounds through the elements with aggression, with violence, the crack of gunshots overbearing next to the deep sense of calm permeating Bodhi's morning ride. There's such reverence to the way Bigelow shoots Swayze in this opening-and that is Swayze, so insistent on doing his own surfing he caught four cracked ribs by the end of production-especially for how damn graceful he looks, less a person than he is an extension of the ocean spray. Bodhi is the bullet, fired hot out of the barrel, his body and board penetrating the waves in a way that is undeniably sensual. Utah tosses himself around a mud-covered shooting range with the type recklessness reserved for rookies, firing at target after target, bullets slicing through the rain. But a whistle blows and Utah, still patently ignoring the rain, cocks his shotgun, the sound bleeding into the roar of the ocean an entire world away.īut while Bodhi and Utah are both enveloped by water, that age-old symbol of cleansing and rebirth, the two men differ in the way they cut through it. He could be a ghost, some sad dead prince in a skintight t-shirt, or a statue, a marble monument to beautiful tortured men. Thousands of miles away, Utah sits on the hood of a car in the pounding rain, his reality a cold metallic blue, shotgun propped on his leg and a stick of gum nonchalantly popped into his mouth. Bodhi paddles a surfboard into the ocean at first light, the last grey in the sky giving way to a golden morning. We meet both Bodhi and Utah soaking wet, but different kinds of soaking wet, a distinction you don't think is possible until you see it. RELATED: The 14 Best Keanu Reeves Movies, Ranked from Excellent to Most Excellent Point Break's opening credits feature two of the best character introductions of all time, a series of wordless images that tell you everything about who these men are, their subversions of the masculine ideal, and the ways in which their lives collide like a wave meeting the shoreline. What's more astounding is the way Bigelow hammers home that aesthetic in the film's first three minutes. It's a wonderful, thrilling movie that effectively changed the public's perception of how beautifully un-rugged an action leading man can be, and Bigelow earns that paradigm shift through the entire film along with cinematographer Donald Peterman and his up-close-and-personal "pogo cam," she frames Utah and Bodhi's journey, all the way up to its sky-diving conclusion, like a simmering romance in a heist caper's body, a Shakespearian tragedy in sopping wet muscle tees. agent Johnny Utah ( Keanu Reeves), the surf-guru bank robber named Bodhi ( Patrick Swayze) he tries to take down, and the bond that borders on yearning the two men build in the process. A crime thriller, a buddy-cop shoot-em-up, and a love story, Point Break injected a much-needed dose of sensitivity back into the genre with the story of rookie F.B.I. In 1991's Point Break, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow proved an action movie can be simultaneously hard-hitting and soft as a California sunset.
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