The 2015 ‘Point Break’ Remake is One of the Best Bad Movies of All Time

New Bodhi’s gang is guilty mostly only of fancy vandalism. Bodhi doesn’t actually kill anyone, unless you count the members of his gang—named, incredibly, Chowder, Roach, Grommet, and Jeff—who die one by one in the process of completing all of Ozaki’s stunts. And at least one of these deaths is the direct result not of Bodhi, but of Utah himself, for pushing them to take an even more XXXTREME line down cliffs on their snowboards. Not everyone has that mountain-people blood, it seems.

As for Utah’s love interest, Samsara (yes, the Sanskrit word for wandering), played by Teresa Palmer (trading tomboy Lori Petty for an actress who looks like a bikini model, natch), Utah accidentally kills her himself during an attempt to foil the gang’s bank robbery on an Italian mountaintop. Though not before the two share numerous cannoodly interludes that look like massive-budgeted REI ads, sharing meals atop mountains in the alps with Bracey wearing plaid flannels that look like they came from the Hurley apres-snowboard collection.

During one deep chat by the fire, it comes out that Samsara even had a personal connection to the mysterious eco warrior, Ono Ozaki. “When my parents died in an avalanche when I was nine, he gave me a home,” Samsara tells Utah. “He could have finished the entire Eight, he was that good. But instead he got himself killed giving back for that ordeal,” he continues. “He positioned his small boat in the North Atlantic between a Norwegian whaling ship and a pod of humpbacked whales. As much as I worshiped Ozaki, that was his Achilles heel. He truly believed that he could change the world with an idea.”

“Ideas can be powerful,” Utah mutters between hair sways.

“Not as powerful as a whaling ship.”

Aaaaand, scene!

Yet the Point Break remake wouldn’t be as watchable as it is if it were just hilariously, exuberantly stupid. If himbo screenwriter Kurt Wimmer, previously the inventor of the cult classic, just-for-movies martial art “gun kata,” as popularized in 2002’s Equilibrium, is responsible for giving the film its epic lore (the mythos of Ono Ozaki seems to have transcended Point Break the same way that Gun Kata transcended Equilibrium), director Core (previously a cinematographer on The Fast and The Furious, itself a spiritual Point Break remake) gives the Point Break remake its genuinely thrilling sense of style and scale.

For most of the movie, Core—and is “Ericson Core” not itself a perfect Point Break name?— appears to be working with an unlimited drone-and-helicopter budget. Most of it consists of his cameras swooping around the world’s best extreme sports athletes performing their most death-defying stunts, filmed with state of the art cameras and no CGI.

This may be the main aspect separating the Point Break remake from the other forgotten remakes of the period: where so many of the others felt like cheap CGI retreads, the Point Break remake feels extravagantly expensive. Even as the dialogue tickles your gag reflex, the stunts take your breath away. Whether it’s a big wave surfing scene, supposedly taking in Biarritz (though instantly recognizable as Teahupo’o to anyone who has ever leafed through a surf mag), wind suiting through the Swiss Alps, rock climbing up Angel Falls in Venezuela, or BASE jumping into the Cave of Swallows, Point Break constantly combines the best of Nat Geo and the X-Games. Wing suiting off of cliffs, flying so close to the ground that it splits the grass? Some guys really did that! The fact that humans genuinely risked death for a movie this dumb is part of what makes it art.

The Point Break remake essentially defines the TV Trope described as the “Rule of Cool,” stating that “the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness. (…) All but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality as long as the result is wicked sweet or awesome. Also known in some circles as a ‘rad herring,’ in which something doesn’t make sense within the guidelines of the story’s reality, but it’s too cool not to include it.”

And in that way, the Point Break remake is perfectly in keeping with its source material: it’s a very particular time capsule of its cultural context, and a fascinating mess of contradictions that constantly, thrillingly rides the line between stunning ineptitude and hypercompetence. It’s also super sick.