Kathryn Bigelow’s action-bromance about bank-robbing surfer dudes is an enduring cult gem, thanks to its joining of tropes and tones

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s crazy action romp from 1991 now gets a rerelease. Eric Hobsbawm might have called it the final moment of The Long Eighties Decade of Action Movies, with shootouts, PAEs (pointless action explosions) and a recurring prosthetic cameo for Ronald Reagan. Bigelow’s feminist achievement in showing she could make an action movie as well as any man was perhaps, but probably not, underscored by a brief scene in which leading man Keanu Reeves gets a savage beatdown from a naked young woman.

Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing. Straight-arrow rookie federal agent Johnny Utah, played by Reeves – inscrutable and husky-voiced as ever – is posted to LA, where he’s partnered-cute with an older and irascible officer. This is Pappas, played by Gary Busey, who brusquely remarks how Los Angeles has changed in the past 20 years. “The air got dirty and the sex got clean.” (This is a surfing movie and as such really has to be set on the west coast; we know what Robert Duvall’s surf enthusiast Lt Col Kilgore in Apocalypse Now thought about people from New Jersey who presumed to voice an opinion.)