Point Break (1991) on Netflix
Rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah goes undercover in the Los Angeles surf scene. His partner Angelo Pappas believes the bank robbers, who wear masks of former presidents, are surfers.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/10229,747 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Johnny Utah, a former Ohio State quarterback, is a rookie FBI agent in Los Angeles. With the senior agent Angelo Pappas he works the case of the Ex-Presidents, robbers in rubber masks of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson who take only the cash in the tellers' drawers and are gone in ninety seconds. Pappas believes the robbers are surfers, so Utah goes undercover in the surfing community. After Tyler, an orphaned surfer and restaurant waitress, saves him from drowning on his first attempt, he invents a family tragedy to persuade her to teach him. Through her he meets Bodhi, her ex-boyfriend, and Bodhi's surfing crew, Roach, Grommet and Nathaniel, who let him in. The waves, Bodhi's talk and Tyler pull at him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Point Break (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film came close to production in 1986, with Matthew Broderick, Johnny Depp, Val Kilmer and Charlie Sheen all considered to play Johnny Utah and Ridley Scott directing, before that version fell through.
- Director Kathryn Bigelow was married to executive producer James Cameron and the couple worked on the script together, which became the source of a dispute. Arbitration gave sole credit to the credited writer, Iliff, and in December 2025 Cameron claimed he "wrote Point Break" and "flat out got stiffed by the Writers Guild".
- Shooting the surfing sequences was hard on all three actors, and Swayze cracked four of his ribs. He still refused to use a stunt double for many of the surfing scenes, as he had never had one for fight scenes or car chases.
- Swayze did the skydiving himself; the film's aerial jump instructor Jim Wallace found he was a natural and took to it right away, and he ended up making 55 jumps for the film. Swayze admitted that he almost died six or ten times while shooting.
- Two months before filming, Lori Petty, Reeves and Swayze trained with the former world-class professional surfer Dennis Jarvis on Kauai. Jarvis remembered that Swayze had been on a board a couple of times, Reeves had definitely not surfed before, and Petty had never been in the ocean in her life.
- A few of the action scenes were shot from the point of view of the characters, for which Bigelow and the cinematographer devised an innovative lightweight pogo cam to create a sense of immersion for the audience.
- Although the final scene of the film is set at Bells Beach in Victoria, Australia, it was filmed at Indian Beach in Ecola State Park, in Oregon.
- Swayze's portrayal of Bodhi has been cited by Ubisoft developers as a chief inspiration for the character of Edward Kenway, the pirate antihero of the 2013 video game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
