IN 1991, director Katherine Bigelow, who at the 2010 Oscars became the first woman to direct Best Film (“The Hurt Locker”), teamed with writer Rick King to make a thriller about an unlikely friendship between an undercover FBI agent and a thrill-seeking criminal.  

Last year, director Emerson Core and writer Kurt Wimmer resuscitated Ms Bigelow’s film, adapting Rick King’s original screenplay to embrace a message about climate change and ecological disaster and expanding its collection of extreme sports to include more than riding big waves on a surfboard.

Early sequences involve spectacular trail-biking along a narrow ridge crest, leading to Utah (Luke Bracey) surviving and his buddy not.

Seven years later, Utah is newly recruited to the FBI and assigned to track down a group committing robberies on various countries. After surfing in mid-ocean from a rich man’s chrome-plated floating gin palace, Utah infiltrates the group. What follows includes paragliding from the top of a high Alp wearing suits giving them the aeronautical capabilities of phalangers, snowboarding down almost vertical slopes and scaling a precipice without climbing aids.

Bohdi (Edgar Ramirez) leads followers of a Japanese mystic who defined eight physical challenges as pointing the way to fulfilment and salvation of the planet and died trying to complete one of them. What gives the film a fresh dramatic perspective is the underlying conflict between Utah’s conventional purpose and Bodhi’s no-less-admirable commitment to ecological responsibility. 

In the US, “Point Break” is rated PG. In Australia, it’s M. It reminds us that whenever somebody achieves something really difficult/dangerous on screen, the cameraman got there first. Its locations look magnificent and the stunts provide breathtaking adrenalin rushes.

At Palace Electric, Hoyts, Capital 6 and Limelight