I watched this as part of my effort to watch the movies that my son's Film Analysis class, so I had read an article about directors, good and bad. I am learning all sorts of new vocabulary, and this weeks' concept is an auteur, a director who puts such a stamp on their work that it is recognizable as theirs. It is a terms that was coined by Truffault, and the idea definitely applies to his body of work. This is an early film by Kathryn Bigelow, who is better known for 'Zero Dark Thirty; and 'The Hurt Locker', and the contention is that she deals with morally ambiguous situations as a rule. She is not quite cut from the Hollywood director cloth. She is interested in the ways her characters live dangerously for philosophical reasons. They aren't necessarily men of action so much as they are men of thought who choose action as a way of expressing their beliefs. It adds an intriguing element to their characters, and makes the final confrontation in this movie as meaningful as it can be, given the silliness of the final standoff.
This film, dating back to the early 1990's, is about a band of surfers who have pulled off successful bank robberies for years. Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah (seriously, that is his name), a rookie FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate surfer groups and try to figure out who the bad guys are. He gets adopted early into a local group, makes the rookie mistake of falling for one of them, and then discovers that while she is not part of the bank robbing quartet, that the guys he likes and respects for their unconventional lifestyles are the guys he is after. The story unfolds in a way that keeps the audience involved and Keaves has to grapple with his own demons as well as his love interest and the bad guys. Especially intersting given what the director has done since this time.
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