So finally – finally – went to see the remake of Point Break. Now, I’d never accuse the original Point Break of being high art, particularly good, or even anything but kind of a goofy flick so it’s theoretically possible a remake could be either a more serious-minded approach to surf bank robbers (I guess!) or a self-aware love letter to the silliness of that movie.

This movie took the serious route… or, rather, the self-serious route. It’s so grim and humorless… it doesn’t seem to realize it’s telling a rather silly story. And telling it rather poorly at that. The original flick just had a bunch of surfers who robbed banks to fund their endless summer. This movie has a bunch of extreme sports fanatics (surfing! Snowboarding! Wing-suits! Mountain Climbing!) who want to complete a set of 8 events that will bring them spiritually more in touch with themselves and the Earth… and sometimes they commit crimes in order to give back to the poor or to the Earth… but they only do this sometimes (when the plot needs them to be crooks).

When the villains aren’t committing crimes by way of extreme sports around the world, the movie just clunks to a stop with boring characters and laughable writing (“Man, the Point at which you Break is who you are!” or something like that… because we needed to be explained what the title of the movie meant).

The main character is Johnny Utah… only the movie seems to think that’s a silly name so assures us that Utah is just a nickname (because we wouldn’t want this movie to be silly now, would we?) He’s played by a guy who kind of sort of is interesting only in that he seems to have more of a personality than the bad guys. The guy playing Bodhi is such a non-entity it’s distracting… and on top of that, his three friends look so much like him it’s hard to tell them apart some times. All black-haired, bearded white guys with a ton of tattoos. There’s also a girl who is actually less relevant to the movie than Lauri Petty was in the original. It’s almost an afterthought to toss her into the film.

The movie sometimes looks very good – some of its imagery and extreme sports footage is quite good. A free-diving and wing-suit sequence looked great… but there’s plenty of YouTube and Netflix movies that show real athletes doing similar things.

I went back and rewatched the original – a movie I hadn’t seen in 24 years. It’s a really good movie in comparison. It didn’t necessarily need a remake, but it definitely didn’t need this too-serious remake.

Score: 62