Point Break

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Point Break is a 1991 film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, and directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The title refers to the surfing term point break.

Taglines:

100% Pure Adrenaline.
27 banks in three years - anything to catch the perfect wave!

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Patrick Swayze is Bodhi, the charismatic leader of a gang of surfing bank robbers who steal in order to fund surfing lifestyles and skydiving expeditions and as a form of rebellion against a social system that they believe "kills the human spirit." Reeves plays FBI agent Johnny Utah, who goes undercover in the hope of finding and infiltrating the gang and finds himself increasingly attracted to their adrenaline-charged lifestyle. Bodhi and Utah develop a strong friendship that is doomed from the beginning by this state of affairs, though Bodhi doesn't find out he's FBI until further.

The bank robbers are known as the Ex-Presidents, because they hide their faces behind masks of former US presidents, allowing the filmmakers to insert a subtext of political satire in the action scenes. By the end of the movie, Johnny is so absorbed by this lifestyle that he refuses to arrest Bodhi and instead lets him seek his own death surfing the giant waves of Bells Beach, Australia, in a raging fifty year storm (it occurs once every fifty years). In the end justice takes its toll on the bank robber, but the message that life is empty and meaningless without living on the edge also comes across, as Johnny throws his police badge into the ocean and continues surfing "every day."

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The Ex-Presidents

The masks used by the Ex-Presidents are as follows:

Point Break's Ex-Presidents were parodied in the 2005 film Domino with a group of thieves dressed as and known as The First Ladies. A reference to the film was also made in the Family Guy episode "Ready Willing and Disabled" where a man in a Jimmy Carter mask steals a jar of money and two characters, one a police officer, try to recall which movie it was from (one knew it had Keanu Reeves) as he runs away.

In the French film Brice de Nice, the surfer protagonist lives his life by the film, and tries to rob a bank with a mask of the French President, Jacques Chirac.

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