‘Point Break’ is in a class of its own, and makes for a fascinating counterpart to ‘Rising Sun’ with its master and student, mystical underpinning. A hotshot FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover among the sundrenched Californian surfing community in order to track down a quartet of windsurfers who finance their surfing and skydiving pursuits by robbing banks while wearing the masks of ex-Presidents LBJ, Nixon, Carter and Reagan.

This is part heist drama and part immersion into the workings of Eastern mysticism, with the surfers, led by the aptly named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), searching for the ultimate wave. Whereas the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and attained enlightenment, so Swayze and his team are striving for a different form of this-worldly nirvana by riding the big wave and being absorbed into the cosmos. In line with Buddhist precepts, the thinking here is that Swayze is able to face death with equanimity and serenity rather than fear.

One of the teachings of Buddhism is the notion that one must strive for justice on earth instead of anticipating that injustices will be sorted out posthumously by a Deity, and there is an intriguing undercurrent to ‘Point Break’ whereby the bank robberies play out as means to a spiritual end. No one is supposed to get shot and the thinking is that the ex-Presidents robbed the country and held it to ransom, so they are merely taking what they did to a new level.

The heists each represent the cycle of life and they are seeking psychological release from the mundane. This film has a polished visual style with most scenes shot in bleached sunlight, and it is easy to see why Ridley Scott was apparently once considered to direct it. It was made a decade and a half before Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for ‘The Hurt Locker’, another film that explores male testosterone and which gives us a similar adrenaline rush, and ‘Point Break’ is that curious mixture of the preposterous and the sublime.