Point Break (2015 film): It's just as "meh" as you've heard

I put off watching this one because I don't like the way that Hollywood is tarnishing the career of the late Patrick Swayze by remaking all of his classic and iconic roles. However, this could be one of those films that I believe could be worthy of a remake because our technology is so much better now than it was in 1991 when the original was made.

I was happy about a few things in the film such as the advancement of filming technology and that they used a completely different story, but everything else about the film is woefully bad.

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So where do we start? The film begins with a cringeworthy motocross something or other on a mountaintop where Johnny Utah is riding with a friend to capture footage for some extreme sports company that he works for. As is extremely predictable from the start, his friend that is riding with him ends up dying trying to keep up with Johnny.

Then we fast forward a number of years and he is in the FBI academy. Fan-fucking-tastic.

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While he is in the academy a group of international criminals are busted robbing certain places that are meant to be totally safe but because they are extreme sport experts for some reason, they are able to get away by doing crazy things like jumping motorcycles off the side of skyscrapers and then parachuting to an escape point while the hapless police have the building surrounded. Let's just forget about the fact that we definitely have the ability to follow some people's parachutes as they travel a maximum of a couple of miles from the point that there chutes deployed.

Since none of the other FBI agents have an expertise in extreme sports, Johnny Utah is selected to go after them despite the fact that they are operating outside of the United States and would be beyond their jurisdiction anyway. Whatever right? America gets to do whatever they want!

Johnny has a hunch that the group of extreme sport criminals are going to attend a middle of the ocean surfing expose that only happens when certain tropical storms occur. When they find this super-secret location in the Atlantic there are hundreds of people already in attendance. Not that secret now is it?

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By sheer chance Johnny just happens to drop in on the same wave as one of the criminals and because of this they form a bond and become friends. Johnny now gets to be a part of the gang. Hooray! What are the chances?

Compare this to the way that Keanu Reeve's "Johnny Utah" infiltrated Bodhi's gang in the original film: By way of getting hair samples from surfers on the beach law enforcement is able to only nail down an approximate location of where the gang regularly surfs. Johnny then proceeds to learn how to surf and ends up working his way into the gang slowly. His meeting of Swayze's "Bodie" wasn't just some random bullshit encounter where they both ended up on the same wave. The modern Utah did nothing to infiltrate the gang, he just randomly ends up with them despite the fact that there were hundreds of other people there. It's a stupid!

The story and acting unfortunately doesn't really get any better: For one thing, they chose actors to play the roles of the gang members that have barely understandable accents in English. I had to turn on the subtitles but then quickly turned them off because the dialogue seems as though it was written by 6th graders who know nothing about what it is like to be an adult.

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One of the only things that I can say to this film's credit is some of the extreme sport scenes are really damn cool. I don't even know if wing-suits existed in 1991 but one thing is for sure, we didn't have the ability to film it in the way that they did in the remake of the film. These scenes will keep you on the edge of your seat and they do a great job of making things feel really intense. This is also true of a later scene that involves free climbing. It would have been very difficult or impossible for them to pull this off back in the early 90's.

One amusing aspect that I noticed during all the group stunts was that each member of the crew always wears the same color outfit so that you can determine who is who when they have helmets on. Color coordination is important!

There are so many things that are extremely lame about this production and the fact that it has over 5/10 on review sites makes me think that a lot of people don't even know what the first Point Break even is and probably think the Fast and Furious films are good cinema.

Should I watch it?

The stunts in it are pretty awesome but the rest of the film is pure trash. Even if the original Point Break had never been made I would feel the same way about this movie. It's just BAD. The everything-falls-into-place storyline, the words of wisdom from the criminal gang are cringe AF, and the forced (as well as immediate) love story that thankfully doesn't waste too much of our time is annoying rather than something you get invested in like we did in the original story. Why they felt compelled to hire actors who can barely speak English is something that I cannot understand at all seeing as how this film was marketed almost exclusively to an English-speaking audience.

Other than the stunt scenes this movie has no redeeming qualities to speak of

_{From my research this can be streamed at no additional cost with AppleTV+ and can be rented or purchased from almost anywhere else. I would strongly encourage that you not do so}