It’s a fine summer movie. A lot of that is achieved by its built in safety net (surfing; extreme sports), because as a movie it’s far from perfect. For once, the dialogue and acting are mostly ass, there are so many unintentionally funny lines in this. I quite liked how the characters are written though, the writer seems to have an odd fetish for characters with severe anger management issues (or maybe that’s part of its attempt to critique masculinity, IDK). The story, however, takes a lot of turns that are inexcusably dumb and predictable, even for a movie as cheesy as this one (why is your mole part of the police raid?). Then there’s the action scenes, which are also a bit of a mixed bag. Take the chase around the halfway mark, for example. It starts like an alright, somewhat forgettable car chase, but the foot chase it evolves into is this very visceral, memorable sequence. In fact, it’s so iconic that _Hot Fuzz_ references back to it. The climax is imaginative and inspired, but perhaps it was so difficult to capture that it doesn’t have the best camerawork. All in all, a lot of its appeal comes down to it essentially being GTA in movie form, as told through the police.

6/10