| A group of four men get caught up in a drug deal gone bad. Now it’s 30 years later and their four sons bonded by surfing and their fathers and decide it’s also time to get caught up in a drug deal gone bad. It’s now 30 years after the release of Point Break and Australia decided it needed to make its own Point Break, just cheaper and significantly worse. | | 2023
Directed by: Clive Fleury
Screenplay by: Phillip Avalon, Greg Clayton
Starring: Joe Davidson, Isabel Lucas
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Set in the Gold Coast of Australia, there’s some nice surfing, but the film really fails in being able to combine surfing with crime drama. In real life, the city has boomed as a tourist destination but in this movie it’s a seedy town filled with drug deals and evil drug kingpins and young men who just want to surf but apparently decide there’s nothing better to do than go do some crime.
We get hints at their past, that they know what their fathers got into and some of them were able to get out and live a life of surfing whereas one of them is destined to keep getting sucked into the crime life.
Our main character is Sean (Joe Davidson) he’s like an Australian version of Thor, a god among men with the long beach blonde hair and a body built for surfing. He has a girlfriend and runs a surfboard shop, but when a friend asks him to help out with stealing one drug shipment, Sean gets sucked back into the bad life.
The crime action side of this movie is bad. The dialogue is awful, like laughably bad; the acting especially among the evil drug kingpin is bad – they’ve read about evil in books and seen it on tv and they’re going to play evil as if they’re directly out of a cartoon. My favourite bit of dialogue was when Sean’s girlfriend sees him being questioned by the police, so she calls up a friend of hers: “Sean is in trouble, I need you to use your legal skills.” “Ok.”. That was the entire phone call, to go do legal stuff. The rest of the crime side of the story is exactly like that.
The surfing doesn’t really connect to the crime drama because there is no emotional investment – other than Sean (who we barely get to know apart from surfing and nice girlfriend), we don’t get to know the other characters at all. It’s just a meaningless movie trying to combine two popular genres which does not make a whole movie. Additionally, the score is bad. There is no musical throughline between the score during the crime/action sequences and the score during surfing sequences. The music is very discordant and headache-inducing.
The Sons of Summer may know how to surf but that’s about it.
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