Welcome to Sea World kid! New FBI recruit Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is paired with veteran agent Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey) who is obsessed with finding a gang of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents and has a weird theory that they’re surfers. Johnny infiltrates a group of surfers but things get complicated when he befriends their unofficial leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) a kind of Zen master whose friend Tyler (Lori Petty) is the most unusual woman Johnny’s ever encountered… You run, you die. One of the best movies ever made, a dazzling adrenaline rush of a movie and one of my favourites, a crime-adventure epic that once seen on the big widescreen never forgotten. Even hearing the name mentioned gives me a visceral thrill, reminding me of the first time I saw it in a theatre. It’s a superb movie about surfing, the mystical transformation people experience in water, the lengths people will go to in order to attain freedom, the concept of loyalty versus duty, friendship, sacrifice. And then it soars in a skydiving sequence that literally takes your breath away. This was Reeves’ first brush with Zen – it would be another few years before he became Little Buddha or Neo in The Matrix. Kathryn Bigelow directs from a screenplay by W. Peter Iliff (from a story by him with Rick King) and The deal with remakes is, if it was good in the first place, Don’t. They remade it. How completely unspeakable. This is a stone cold classic. Your life’s not over. You’re surfing
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