Retrospective Film Review

Point Break (1991) • 30 Years Later

An FBI agent goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of surfers who may be bank robbers.

Critics at the time tended to see Point Break as a heavy-on-action spectacle that was light on story and character. Decades later, however, the greater reputation of director Kathryn Bigelow — after Strange Days (1995), The Hurt Locker (2009), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) — has made it ripe for reassessment, bringing to the fore not only Bigelow’s undoubted technical acumen but also its aesthetic and themes.

Point Break certainly is an action movie, perhaps an action movie par excellence, with all the super-rapid camera movement and big physical set pieces that implies. Two sequences in particular (an FBI raid on a group of surf Nazis, and an extended chase in cars and on foot), were amongst the best of their kind in the early-1990s.

But at the same time, it’s also a parody of action movies. Consider its often testosterone-laden dialogue, its ridiculously irritable FBI director Harp (John C. McGinley), and such downright comic notions as Agent Utah (Keanu…