When Kathryn Bigelow’s action thrill ride Point Break premiered in 1991, it promised audiences “100% pure adrenaline.” We haven’t done any hard research on this, but we’re pretty sure that nobody accused her of false advertising. But in the 24 years that followed, her unapologetically cheesy film – about a cop named Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) who goes undercover with a gang of extreme sports bank robbers – has led to a string of imitators, one of which is now one of the most popular action movie franchises in history.
So can this new remake of Point Break, directed by Ericson Core and starring Luke Bracey (The November Man) and Edgar Ramirez (Deliver Us From Evil) hope to make the same impact as the last remake, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious, unofficial though it may have been? Perhaps, but now that we’ve seen the trailer, it sure looks like this new Point Break has way more in common with the Fast and Furious franchise than Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic. Then again, that may be because Ericson Core was the director of photography on The Fast and the Furious already. He’s done this before.
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Sure, it doesn’t look bad, but to us it just looks cobbled together from a string of Point Break imitators, which is bound to make the film a little harder to sell as its own distinct “must see” entity when it finally hits theaters on December 25, 2015.
Maybe that’s just us. We’re skeptics, after all. What say you, audience? Does this new trailer stand out, or does it look like just another action film in a sea of similar fare?
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
