Probably Unanswerable Questions
Is this the best surfing movie ever?; Is it a surf movie or a bank robbery movie?; Why did Utah quit the FBI?; Why does Bodhi hit the vault at the end?; What would it take to jump out of a plane without a parachute?; Is that the craziest thing anyone has done in an action movie?; Did Bodhi die?; How good was Johnny Utah at Ohio State?; Why don't movies carry characters across films?; Why do we love bank robbery movies?; What is the best bank robbery scene of all time?; Would a Netflix series have beaten the remake?; Did Bodhi take a bigger cut?
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 00:49:07Read transcript
- Is this the best surfing movie ever? Alternatives come up, the one about the girl with one arm, Blue Crush, Endless Summer and Chasing Mavericks with Gerard Butler; a movie cannot only be a surfer movie, and this one is a bank robbery surfing movie, which is why it stands alone.
- Why did Utah quit the FBI at the end? He had internalized Bodhi's dead-souls-on-the-freeway philosophy, which he had been looking for all along, and wanted to surf; he may also have realized he is a terrible cop who went undercover without changing his famous name and wore no mask on the stakeout, things The Fast and the Furious did better.
- Why does Bodhi hit the vault at the end and betray his philosophy? Perhaps he had started to truly hate himself and was self-destructive, trying to die for the last ten minutes after ordering Rosie to kill a woman.
- What chain of events would it take to jump out of an airplane without a parachute? Zero; asked about twin boys pushed out of the plane, the answer jokes about having another kid. It is called the single craziest believable thing in an action movie, more plausible than Dom diving off a crashing car to catch Letty, because Utah's fearless character is built to make it believable.
- Did Bodhi actually die at the end? Yes. A host points out that the film opens alternating between Utah in a rainy FBI field test and Bodhi surfing and ends with both in the same situation, Bodhi surfing until he died and Utah in the FBI until he was not; the host who called it a bad movie is said to have walked that back.
- How good was Johnny Utah at Ohio State? He was all-conference and wore number nine; Johnny Utah jerseys are seen around the Columbus campus; in the early era of athletic quarterbacks like Randall Cunningham he might have been a second-round pick rather than an Elway or Andrew Luck, and probably the greatest Ohio State quarterback to that point, with Troy Smith's Heisman noted.
- Why don't movies carry characters over? Keanu in The Replacements could have been Johnny Utah instead of Shane Falco, a former FBI agent, and Bodhi could have been Dalton, who lost his mind after Kelly Lynch left him.
- Why do we love bank robbery movies so much? Free money, the excitement of imagining it even in Baby Driver, and ripping off a building rather than hurting people, taking down the man and the system.
- What is the best bank robbery scene of all time? The bank robbery that goes bad in Heat and leads to the shootout, recalled from the Heat Rewatchables as feeling like people were shooting in the theater; another host leans toward the opening of Dark Knight, with the robbers killing each other and the bus escape.
- Raised late as a forgotten unanswerable question: would a Netflix series about bank-robbing surfers and an infiltrating FBI agent have been better than the remake? Way better, with episodes for Lori Petty, the football backstory and the gang partying and surfing in Thailand, Australia and Goa.
- Did Swayze get a bigger cut than everybody? He was democratic and they all got the same, whereas LeBron as a bank robber would take 35 percent.