01/07/2024
LATER TODAY - "POINT BREAK" (2015 / dir. - Ericson Core)
Originally posted about this film back in 2021. And, as not much has changed, what follows is essentially a repost, ... but with a few updates, additions and edits. 👍 ______________
First of all, yeah! I know! Ericson Core's 2015 remake of POINT BREAK comes nowhere near Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 original. I love the original. Saw it at the movies opening weekend and have owned it on almost every home video format since. I even still have the LaserDisc (remember those?)! It's straight-up one of the best action films of the 90s, ... and without a doubt in the top 25 of all time. But let's make something very clear, ... which usually ISN'T, and is often lost in the emotional morass of social media threads and message boards these days. Namely, that a remake - good or bad - doesn't take anything away from an original. So, all of the gaseous pissed-off-ed-ness talk when people first hear of a remake of something, and they say with almost clockwork-like knee-jerk predictability, "They're just going to ruin ' such and such'.". Well, no. It's not a given. And the lack of logic in such talk is especially evident if it happens to be a remake / redo / reimagining (help yourself to your choice of words) said person happens to be looking forward to. I mean, Jeez!, along those lines, if I had a buck for everyone who complained about remakes, but who over the last couple of months have also at the same time been going on about how "Robert Eggers' upcoming NOSFERATU is absolutely gonna be great!" - y'know, before even seeing it - then I could probably buy Elon Musk and make him my bitch 😆. Nah, seriously, though, I wrote a GullCottage online piece a few years ago delving into remakes, reboots and continuations. And it went a wee bit PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, getting into how most times (and without the person ever realizing it, ... and especially if the damn movie remake hasn't even been made yet, and people are just responding to news that one is coming) the disdain actually has less to do with the "remake" or "reboot" itself per se, and more to do with an individual subconsciously bothered that the remake will futz about with personal memories (a certain time in our lives which was special, etc.) which we've over time come to associate closely with that film. So, ...
Contrary to the constant whine, there HAVE been some damn good remakes over the years - a great many, in fact: among them Carpenter's THE THING, Cronenberg's THE FLY, Tony Scott's MAN ON FIRE and THE TAKING OF PELHAM, Scorsese's THE DEPARTED, Sturges' THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, Phillip Kaufman's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, Dick Richard's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY with Robert Mitchum, James Mangold's 3:10 TO YUMA, Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, Scorsese's THE DEPARTED, the recent A STAR IS BORN, Glen Morgan's 2003 version of WILLARD, Walter Hill's LAST MAN STANDING, and all the way back to Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (those two films remakes by the filmmakers who made the originals!) and many more. So, the auto-assumption that "remakes always suck" is ... . Well, sorry, but that's b.s. And, oh yeah, so is (as well as being uber hypocritical) the insistence that we should / need to have new interpretations of Shakespeare, O'Neil and others, ... and that we're more than willing to self-righteously severely criticize as dangerously narrow-minded religious dogma which makes people protest films like Scorsese's LAST TEMPATATION OF CHRIST or books like Salman Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES, ... but we get just as downright narrow-mindedly dogmatic ourselves about a new take on SUPERMAN, STAR TREK, STAR WARS or (yeah, even) POINT BREAK, ... but rather than use the word "dogma" we substitute the more euphemistic "canon" 😄. Anyway, with all that said ...
Yeah, I admit when I first heard a remake was coming of POINT BREAK I had absolutely no desire to see it. That was until I learned it was being directed by Ericson Core. I was a big fan of Core when he was primarily a cinematographer. Flip through your mental Rolodex (Google that word, you under 40 young'ens - haha!) and think on the stunning imagery and visual tone of films like PAYBACK, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and DAREDEVIL. Yeah, that was Core's work. Then he segued into becoming a feature film director with Disney's 2006 true life sports drama INVINCIBLE with Mark Wahlberg. He also more recently directed Disney's 2019 sled dog adventure drama TOGO with Willem Dafoe. Oh, and if you've noticed a common thread among many of those aforementioned films it's that they're mostly "sports / or extreme sports action / dramas". So, I'd fallen in love with Core's work, and when I heard he was directing the POINT BREAK redo, I found myself willing to at least give it a roll. BTW, Core usually does double duty also as cinematographer on the films he directs. So, visually at least, they're very much HIS vision. Anyway, unfortunately I'd waited too long to see POINT BREAK theatrically, and it was gone too soon. But that's why on the 8th day, after God took a little rest, he created DVDs and Blu-rays. Then on the 9th day he decided to create the department store cheapie bin - and "He looked upon it and said, 'It is good'". It certainly was for me because that's where I found a copy of Core's POINT BREAK for a couple'a bucks a few years ago. I brought it home as part of a five or six film haul that afternoon, put it on, and was pleasantly surprised at how much I genuinely enjoyed it.
I think a decent remake should, yes, carry the DNA of the original - otherwise what's the point? But it shouldn't just be a clone. That's why I'm not crazy about John Badham's LA FEMME NIKITA remake POINT OF NO RETURN. As technically well made as it is, it's pretty much just Luc Besson's original film, ... but only in English. It even uses many of the very same camera angles and edits as Besson's. So, no, to me a decent remake should be like any other adaptation from original source material (be it a book, play, comic book, TV series or whatever) in that it to a certain degree has to stand ON ITS OWN as its own entity. As such it should use that original DNA to create, not a clone, but a new lifeform in and of itself utilizing the original "donor's" very unique DNA strand. And that new lifeform should then be made every bit as germane to its era and social zeitgeist as the original was to its own. This is what Carpenter's THE THING (more about a lack of trust than about a monster alien) and Cronenberg's THE FLY (the transformation patterned after the body horror of a degenerative disease like cancer) arguably does better than almost any other remake in recent memory. And, while, no, Core's POINT BREAK doesn't quite measure up to those films, it does shake up the original script a little. Among other things I like is how the new film holds onto the original's "Zen subtext". But how this time it's less about surfing in particular, and more about the lure of extreme sports in general - one of those "sports" being crime in the eyes of Bodhi's gang. The gang's reason for committing the various robberies has also been changed in that here they're kinda / sorta "eco-terrorists" with a certain "message" they're sending. Case in point, in the first robbery we witness, they don't keep the money, but they rather give it away / let it rain down upon the residents of a poor Mexican village. And speaking of Mexico, I also dig how the story isn't locked into Southern California this time around but becomes more global - taking us also to Mumbai, France, the Swiss Alps and elsewhere. There's also that cast!
Luke Bracey (of HACKSAW RIDGE and G.I. JOE: RETALIATION) is okay as Johnny Utah - the part originated by Keanu Reeves in the original. But Edgar Ramirez is flat out awesome as Bodhi. He brings a raw and near-animalistic vibe to the character. And you don't get any better than Ray Winstone as Special Agent Pappas (the Gary Busey role in the original). We've also got the never-less-than-awesome Delroy Lindo on deck as a high-ranking FBI trainer / instructor - a character not in the original film. And, oh, the extreme sports stunt work IS extreme IN the extreme! That movie poster with the guys skydiving out of the rear of the C-130 with the money? That's not an exaggeration. That's one of the opening scenes - the one in Mexico. And it's not CGI'd. Most of the stunt work (which includes butt-crazy motorcycle work, wing suits, rock climbing and more) are all done "Bond-style" / MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-style - which is to say with stunt teams actually doing it all for real, and not faking it with computer generated stand-ins.
So, in the end, no, the original's got nothing to worry about. But, as far as remakes in general go, Core's take on the material is one of the better surprises to come along in a while. FYI,...
It's also a helluva lotta fun to watch both films back-to-back.
"100% pure adrenaline, baby!" 😉
CEJ
