Point Break (1991 Version Film Review)

1991 20th Century Fox/Largo Entertainment
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow; Written by: W Peter Illiff
Starring: Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, and Lori Petty
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 122 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 8/10

Stop me if you've heard this setup before:
Guy is starting quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes. 
Guy takes his team all the way to the Rose Bowl, only to suffer an in-game, career-ending knee injury. 
Guy joins the FBI. 
Guy partners with an ex-maverick who's been investigating a string of cash-drawer bank robberies, committed by four men wearing ex-President masks. 
Guy's new parter suspects the bank robbers are surfers. 
Guy must now learn to surf in order to go undercover to infiltrate surfer gangs.
It's a tale as old as time.
Guy this time is named Johnny Utah, and is played to early-90's "dude, brah" perfection by Keanu Reeves. Utah is apparently out of touch with his emotions, having lived a life of parentally-expected perfection up to this point, a straight-A student in life. Thankfully, Utah's first attempts at surfing nearly kill him, leading him to the rescuing arms of the free-spirited Tyler, played with killer attitude by early 90's middle-child dream, Lori Petty.
Tyler helps introduce Utah to the freest spirit of them all, Patrick Swayze's Bodhi, who's an ace at embracing his spiritual side through daredevil hijinks...but may be expensing said hijinks through nefarious means. Utah and Bodhi make an instant connection, with Bodhi seeing a caged bird in Utah that needs to be set loose, and Utah seeing a guy that...well, wait a minute, is this guy the bank robber?!
Dismissing Point Break as silly, early 90's ephemerality does the film a disservice. Yes...Point Break is dated. Grunge killed its hair metal and butt-rock soundtrack before the compact disc even hit Tower Records' shelves. The plot is as extreme as a 90's soda commercial. Swayze and Reeves performances aren't Oscar-worthy. However, skipping out on the film, or watching it with detached irony because of the previous factors will cause the viewer to miss out. Yes, it's just big, dumb fun...but it's big, dumb fun done well, to the extreme, with heart.
Reeves and Swayze's strange charisma can't be duplicated, and when it's united in this film, in this setting, in this story, at the service of these two characters, it's truly something special. Director, Kathryn Bigelow, who'd win a directing Oscar 20 years later for The Hurt Locker, seems to realize she's got lightning in a bottle here, and makes sure she does nothing to mute it, making everything as big as she possibly can, but never quite going too far over the the top.
The result is a film that's somehow ridiculous, larger than life, and strangely affecting. Point Break never once winks at the audience, betraying a driving innocence at its core that allows the film to work on a level a similar work of detached irony could never reach...
100% pure adrenaline.