RIP Patrick Swayze

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"Yo Johnny! I see you in the next life!"

Someone's face disintegrated into a sneer when I mentioned the Patrick Swayze surf movie, Point Break, last week.

I'd been laying out my case for Kathryn Bigelow's latest film, The Hurt Locker, and her talent for action filmmaking. Fatally misreading the intellectual landscape, I condensed my argument to: "Y'know, she made Point Break.."

Cue The Sneer – and a dark hole to China opening up beneath me as I dug myself deeper with every word: "Undercover cops – surfing! Bank robbers – surfing! Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah, Patrick Swayze as Bodhi – surfing! What's not to like?!"

But this was just before Swayze passed away and there was no swell of posthumous affection to tap into.

I degenerated into a burbling, inarticulate monkey for the rest of the evening. My bomb-proof depiction of Swayze cutting tubes and pulling bank jobs had faltered, childhood ideals had been burned, my confidence shot.

Truth is, I find it hard to defend my love of Point Break on any intelligent, rational level. One critic described it as "an exercise in stylish lunkheadedness: gorgeous but dumb as a post." And I'd probably agree.

But it came in the days of VHS tapes and village-store rentals. Older sport-action titles moulding in the racks were Karate Kid, BMX Bandits, Rocky sequels and Days of Thunder. There were no YouTube clips on surfing and snowboarding, no deluge of sponsor-made movies, little in the way of visual stimulus beyond the yawn of football and cricket. Unless you liked Dirty Dancing of course.

But I wasn't into the "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" line, or the pottery-wheel sex of Ghost for that matter, so Swayze came to me in the form of Bodhi: searching, surfing, heisting, jumping out of planes and ultimately choosing death for the sake of personal freedom.

Yeah, the script might've been hokum but Bigelow's action was raw, her casting perfect and the lure of the ocean never lost. Reeves flinging his badge into the sea like a surf-obsessed Dirty Harry and Swayze sinking his rail in slow mo with a liquid soundtrack was far cooler and more visceral than Ralph Macchio's dorky crane kick or Sly lumbering up some steps to a 70s anthem.

Forget your brain, you love Point Break with your retinas, your gut and your long gone, pre-digital, surf-starved innocence.

But good luck trying to find a copy at Blockbusters, everyone's got the damn thing out for hire.

RIP Patrick Swayze.

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RIP Patrick Swayze (text) by Tors Arnold is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.