I did not had the chance to see this movie in theater last year. I could not remember the reason but most likely it would be due to some busy work days since usually an action movie would be a must for me to see in theater to enjoy the special effects and sound effects. Anyway, the movie finally premiered on Saturday Night in HBO TV cable. By chance I was having the usual staycation with my wife (who got another free 1 night stay at a hotel in South Jakarta) on Saturday and the hotel's inhouse TV entertainment included this channel. So I got myself ready to see this movie at 8 PM.
Brief Story Line
Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey - G.I.Joe: Retaliation, The November Man etc) was an extreme athlete who love to do various dangerous stunts and also very famous due to the huge publicity in youtube. After an incident happened 7 years earlier, Johnny decided to indefinitely stop his acts and continued his school & college and trained to become an FBI agent. Before becoming a full FBI agent, he was being thoroughly checked by FBI Instructor Hall (Delroy Lindo - Malcom X, Gone in 60 Seconds etc). He was then asked to attend a briefing about a heist done to a US diamond company on a very tall building in Mumbai, India by some people who escaped by parachutes.
In later stage, a similar heist happened in Mexico on a flying plane where the newly printed US money were then released from the plane. The perpetrators escaped seemingly into the jungle. Johnny was able to identify that the crimes were done by the same people who were planning to complete a list of extreme 8 ways to honor the nature called Ozaki 8. He believed that their next attempt would be to surf in France where the waves were unbelievably high and only happened many years once. Hall believed in this analysis and sent Johnny to France and to work together with Pappas (Ray Winstone - Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Sweeney etc).
In France, Pappas who was a much senior agent accompanied Johnny to the sea where there were already lot of surfers. Johnny also tried to go and surf, despite he was not very good at it. While attempting to surf on one of the highest wave, Johnny interrupted another surfer's flow and he fell into the water. The other surfer had to stop and help to get him out of the water. It was revealed later that his name was Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez - Carlos, Zero Dark Thirty etc) and he was also a rather extreme athlete accompanied by 3 friends, Roach (Clemens Schick), Chowder (Tobias Santelmann - Kon Tiki) and Grommet (Matias Varela - Assassin's Creed). They were sponsored by a very rich person named Pascal Al Fariq (Nicolas Kinsky) to do those extreme acts.
Despite some suspicion from Chowder, Johnny was able to infiltrate into this group and even managed to be very close to their friend named Samsara (Teresa Palmer - Lights Out, Hacksaw Ridge etc). After another wild stunt that they did together, Bodhi's whole group could finally accept Johnny. However, Pappas on the other hand was very upset as he thought that Johnny was only trying to enjoy glamorous undercover life.
Finally it was revealed that another heist would be done indeed by Bodhi and his friends which Johnny was trying to tell him not to. However Bodhi insisted that in order to complete the Ozaki 8, they had to give back to nature.
So could Johnny stop this latest heist? Could he catch Bodhi and his friends who he had become so close in the past few days? Find them all in this full of wild extreme stunts movie.
End of Brief Story Line
As I mentioned on the title above, this movie was a remake from the 1991 movie with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze as the main characters and had gained a cult status ever since. Before I do any comparison to the original, I would like to share my thoughts first on this 2015 version. As a movie, we would be amazed with the suspenseful extreme stunts such as the wingsuit scene (jumping from the Alps and like flying stunt), or the snowboarding from top of a snowy mountain. Including the chasing stunts were also very cool (one scene kind of reminded me of the latest Jason Statham movie, Mechanic: Resurrection). In term of story though, this one was a bit complex. I think the writers wanted to make the characters had some depth, like the reasons of Johnny to become FBI agent, or the reason for Bodhi to do what he did.
I did regret one bit though that I did not watch this movie in theater, as I believed the sound effect and the beautiful sceneries and breathtaking scenes with those suspenseful stunts would be very astonishing and lovely to see on large screen. However, I did feel that other than those stunts, the movie did not offer something new (especially when it was a remake of something that was done 24 years before).
Meanwhile, if we compare to the original 1991 version, then it's a different ball game. I hate to admit (and a little bit embarrassing as well) that I had many chances to see it in TV or online streaming or even through DVD, but I never did. So I only saw the original version last night after I saw the remake version. Once I saw the original one, I could understand the reasons for that version to be a cult classic. It had all the ingredients of such movie, with a rather brutal fight scene during the raid of one group of suspects and a very youthful Keanu Reeves & Patrick Swayze (fresh from his role in the popular romantic supernatural movie Ghost) plus of course one of the craziest stunt back then, at the finale during the chase between Johnny and Bhodi. Btw, I remembered one scene that was quite popular also referenced by Nick Frost together with Simon Pegg in the very fun action movie titled Hot Fuzz.
For those who loved the original movie, I doubt that they would appreciate this remake as it changed too many stuffs and made the film from originally a straight forward story into an overly complex one. However, if you are a neutral person who never saw the original like me or perhaps you did not get the chance to see this remake version when it played in the theater last year, then you can give it a shot. It would be playing once or maybe twice a day in HBO till next week. For a movie that offered suspenseful over the top extreme stunt, then this can certainly provide you such experience. But if you wanted to preserve your image of the 1991 original version, then perhaps it would not be a good idea to watch this one. The choice is yours.
Happy watching!
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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