Thrillseekers: "Point Break"

The BFI's Art of Action season heads out on tour this weekend with a reissue of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow's enduring 1991 thriller. The key to fullest understanding and enjoyment here remains a single word: adrenaline. Bigelow seized upon the kind of B-movie script that would have been in regular Hollywood circulation in the VHS era (this one written by Rick King and W. Peter Iliff) and pumped everything up, not least the characters, observed continually egging one another on to higher states of ridiculousness. It's not enough that the antagonists are bank robbers, they have to be surfers as well, spending their afternoons off chasing a very different kind of high; over on the cop side of the ledger, uptight police chief John C. McGinley is forever on hand to fire a rocket up somebody's ass, while hotshot detective Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) initiates an argument with colleague Gary Busey just to elevate this oldtimer's pulse to a level where he might reasonably get in the game. I'm still not sure we buy this young and relatively untested Keanu as an actor, let alone a crack criminal investigator - if they were only a little more circumspect, the surfers might well spot a glaring hole or fifteen in his cover story of having had the werewithal to study law - but he's unimprovable casting as one who is totally psyched and prepared to get completely gnarly. As he tells the surfer girl who provides a way into this underground (Lori Petty): "I'm gonna learn to surf or break my neck." All or nothing; do or die; fight or flight. There aren't many films that have seemed more like a breathless and throaty battle cry, or more deserving of the three-word summation what a rush.

The movie itself is elevated way above its peers by Bigelow's singular ability to channel and give cinematic shape to that adrenaline. Buff dudes on boards, baring their behinds to security cameras; stricken cops, emptying their service revolvers into the air. Rival surfers getting in Keanu's face; the raids and chases; the bits with the lawnmower, the makeshift flamethrower, the tossed pooch, the parachutes. Everything in Point Break looks like one of those virtual-reality clips that became such a contentious currency in Bigelow's subsequent masterpiece Strange Days - it's all pure, untrammeled sensation - although the filmmaker sporadically pauses to weaponise the Petty character as a counterpoint to this extreme machismo. It may be hard for younger audiences to fathom, but such boundless action was a commonplace at the multiplex in the 1990s, the decade of The Fugitive, Speed and In the Line of Fire: Bigelow takes her setpieces as seriously as anybody could, shooting with care and attention to detail and spatial coherence, and packaging the whole with glistening stars and a period-evocative soundtrack. For two hours, we watch as moviemaking is transformed into a Red Bull-ready extreme sport, though upon first release, this now-canonical modern classic would have seemed no more than an unusually enjoyable popcorn flick, one of several that came down the tubes in any given month; you can get a sense of what's ebbed away over the years by comparing the original with the 2015 remake no-one's watched or even thought about since the weekend it opened and closed. Bigelow now seems a little lost, too: an Oscar contender with Zero Dark Thirty as recently as a decade ago, she's been AWOL since 2017's Detroit, and may be suffering as much as anybody from the studios' indifference to backing mid-budget, non-franchise features. Yet as Point Break continues to bear out, she knows what tickles our lizard brains better than almost any other American filmmaker around.

Point Break returns to selected cinemas from today.