Point Break is ‘bigger and better’, says Luke Bracey, who plays Johnny Utah

The long-awaited remake of the 1991 action-drama classic, starring Aussie Luke Bracey, makes a historic premiere in Beijing.

The new Point Break movie is bigger and better than the original because it features action scenes that were unimaginable when the original was made in 1991, says Australian actor Luke Bracey.

Bracey, who started his career on Home And Away, plays Johnny Utah, the FBI agent originally portrayed by Keanu Reeves (opposite underground surf-gang leader Patrick Swayze).

Luke Bracey: “It’s just a huge movie in terms of how different it is from the original.”

In the remake that comes out in China on Friday, the US on Christmas day and Australia on January 1, extreme sports take center stage. Bracey’s Utah infiltrates a group of thrill-seeking athletes suspected of being criminals. Action adventure feats include big-wave surfing, wingsuit flying, sheer-face snowboarding, free rock climbing and high-speed motorcycling.

The film’s promoters are billing Point Break as the first Hollywood film to have its world premier in China, and Bracey, who attended the premiere in Beijing on Tuesday, said he expected it to be the start of a new trend in Hollywood movies.

The movie also stars Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez as the athletes’ leader Bodhi, Australian actress Teresa Palmer as a surfer, and British actor Ray Winstone.

The original film directed by Kathryn Bigelow was a hit that grossed $US83.5 million worldwide - less than the remake’s budget of more than $US125 million.

Some stunts and sports in the latest movie “hadn’t even been thought of when the original was made, in the original they were still paddling into waves,” said Bracey. Wing suiting, the sport of flying through the air in a special suit, hadn’t been conceived at that time and it was in the mid-1990s that people “started using jet skis just to catch waves that were bigger than they could paddle into.” “So, to use a cliche, it’s bigger, and it’s better and it’s just a huge movie in terms of how different it is from the original,” he said.

Even the specialists pushed the limits during filming. Freelance Australian big-wave surfer Laurie Towner was injured while shooting one of the more dramatic action scenes, at notorious Teahupoo, Tahiti.

Bracey said the remake has been “expanded across the world.” It was filmed in nine countries in four continents, including scenes of wingsuit flying in Switzerland, free rock climbing in Venezuela, snowboarding in the Italian Alps and surfing in Hawaii.

The world has become more interconnected since the last movie, so “what occurs on one side of the world doesn’t just affect that side of the world these days, it affects the other side of the world in terms of a lot of things, be it geopolitical, economic, be it environmental,” he said. “I think the sooner that humanity figures that out and comes to terms with that, we’ll start working together even more.” The movie’s makers say they used world-class athletes rather than stunt doubles in the film, and Bracey, who grew up in Sydney and learned to surf from a young age, also took part in snowboarding and rock-climbing - including a sequence on Venezuela’s Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall.

“It’s a kilometer above the Earth, and that had me hanging off Angel Falls looking down, telling them to turn on the cameras in case I fell so at least it was on camera,” he said.

The movie opens in China on Friday, three weeks before the US, showing how the Chinese movie-going market, on course to surpass the US as the biggest, is increasingly important to global blockbusters.

Hollywood has been increasingly chasing the rapidly growing Chinese market as box office receipts fall at home. Box office revenue in China last year was $4.9 billion, almost three times as much as 2010.