I was surprised how well this early 90s action flick held up; I would now regard it as one of the best action films I’ve seen. Keanu Reeves is the star, a FBI agent called Johnny Utah going after a gang of bank robbers; he is here very much in his 90s role as a kind of blank, a “neo”, likeable enough but not to be compared to his profoundly human old dog John Wick; the real power of the film is from the perfect balance of the almost-not-there Reeves and the brilliant supporting cast, e.g. Mister Joshua himself, the excellent Gary Busey as Utah’s older partner who theorises that the bank robbers are in fact surfers, leading to Utah embedding himself in the surfer community.

And then of course there is Dalton, Patrick Swayze, surely one of the most beautiful men, the most poetic, sensitive, violent, spiritual. Here he’s actually called Boddhi and is the head of the surfers, full of gems of hippy wisdom but also perfectly capable of delivering the meritorious beatdown.

There are also little cameos, e.g. Tom Sizemore as an undercover DEA agent, Anthony Kiedis (Swan from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) as a belligerent surfer, and a great John C McGinley (Sgt O’Neill from Platoon) as a the obligatory 80s stupid police boss.

It is wonderfully directed by Katherine Bigelow, with adroit and imaginative camerawork. She has the sensitivity to let the characters breathe and be complexly human & brutal. There is a rich humanity to the film, with even quite minor characters given a convincing, individual presence & magic.

The whole hippy surfer thing, about escaping, Matrix-like, from the workaday system is well-handled; for all its evident silliness, somehow it seems plausible here, with Patrick Swayze talking the talk and surfing the surf. In these moments, you can believe in the Männerbund, in the conflict & confrontation of a man with his fate, and his eventual enlightenment & release, even if in death.