Just the Ticket #132: Lethal Weapon
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
Written and created by Shane Black (The Predator, Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), co-produced and directed by Richard Donner (Superman), and co-scored by the Eric Clapton, the first Lethal Weapon stars Mel Gibson (Fat Man) and Danny Glover (Predator 2 and Switchback) as Martin Riggs (the titular Lethal Weapon, an ex-Black Ops Vietnam vet-turned-cop with a suicidal streak and a drinking problem born of PTSD and the recent death of his wife in a car accident prior to the film) and Roger Murtaugh (the by-the-book cop and ex-soldier who just turned fifty, got stuck with Riggs as his cliché-requisite new partner, and has a cliché-requisite catchphrase: "I'm getting too old for this shit").
Two years later, the dream team of Donner, Silver, Clapton, Gibson, and Glover (with Darlene Love, Traci Wolfe, Damon Hines, and Ebonie Smith returning as the Murtaugh family, Steve Kahan returning as Captain Murphy, and Mary Ellen Trainor returning as LAPD psychologist Stephanie Woods; all of whom became series regulars) returned for Lethal Weapon 2, which also featured early roles for Breaking Bad's Dean Norris (one of Riggs' and Murtaugh's co-workers, who gets ample screentime and dialogue for a background character, for reasons that will be tragic later) and Rescue Me fire chief, Jack McGee (here playing a handyman who is building Murtaugh a new garage to set up Chekov's Nail Gun and provide a setting for one of this film's most iconic gunfights), and most importantly, Joe Pesci as franchise comedy relief, Leo Getz (an annoying, but possibly on-the-spectrum, federal witness whom our two leads are tasked with protecting because he laundered--and skimmed--money for the villains, and he wants to testify against them).
In contrast, Lethal Weapon 3 is perhaps the series at its most "take all the jokes that worked in the first two and set them to cringe and repeat."
I'd actually like to close out this film franchise review with a recommendation for the 1993 National Lampoon parody, Loaded Weapon 1. And also the embarrassing detail that, when I was younger, I didn't fully understand the concept of parody (despite having seen both Hot Shots movies and the Naked Gun trilogy in years prior), and spent many years in disappointment that there wasn't a Loaded Weapon, Too.
Not Getting Too Old For This?
Merry Christmas, Ticketholders!
There won't be anything so ambitious as last year's Countdown to TixMas special, as time did not permit a full Lethal Weapon franchise dive (a re-watch of the television series would have been too much bingeing on my part--after DanMachi and RWBY--and the fifth installment in the film series is in pre-production Hell for various reasons) but the promised gift is still coming down your chimney.
All you have to do is please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest stocking stuffers of news on my content.
I was born in the mid-80s and did a lot of my growing up and gathering of pop-cultural awareness through the 90s and early 2000s, with my desire for a broader knowledge base fading some time in the 2010s, when I began to feel like I'd hit the point where what I grew up with didn't seem worth hanging onto, and what was then gaining popularity didn't measure up to the perceived quality that my nostalgia senses insisted upon. Wrestling, TV, music, and movies that my younger mind held in high regard weren't as good as I remembered, and nothing to follow would ever be that good again.
One of the film genres I grew up with that doesn't have the appeal it did at its time was the 90s buddy cop movie. In almost every instance, there was the gruff Police Captain with a short fuse who forced his two least likely subordinates to work together (sometimes, it was a by-the-book cop teamed up with a loose cannon, or a grizzled detective paired with a cartoon rabbit, or a clean-cut, out-of-shape cop having to take care of a messy, energetic dog) and they ended up blowing up half the town with almost no repercussions because the threat level of the villain justified the means. In this more aware age of Black Lives Matter, SWATting pranks gone wrong, and other accidental (with or without sarcastic finger quotations) shooting incidents, the days of sensationalizing and celebrating rogue police activity in cinematic form seems to truly be behind us.
While it was by no means the first "buddy cop movie," and has its fair share of poorly aged moments, Lethal Weapon is a much more coherent and (almost) aware movie of its kind than I remember. And it takes place near Christmas, which makes it a Christmas movie, which (apart from its Lethal Finale entry not being out by now like I expected when I planned this selection last year) makes it the perfect franchise to talk about today.
The movie opens with the sole reason for my mind associating "Jingle Bell Rock" with a coked-out hooker jumping to her death, and we find out through dialogue at the Murtaugh household, and later at the scene of her death (where she is positively identified by a...co-worker--a bit part by Lycia Naff, best known as the three-breasted woman in the original Total Recall--as Amanda Hunsaker, which is either the best name for a hooker of all time, or one of Bart Simpson's prank calls to Moe's Tavern) that she is the daughter of one of Murtaugh's old war buddies (played by Maniac Cop's Tom Atkins). Later, a conversation with Mr. Hunsaker himself reveals that he is being used as a front for a Black Ops group led by General McAllister (Halloween 6's Mitchell Ryan) and Mr. Joshua (an imposing and masterfully understated Gary Busey, known for the original Point Break and in horror circles as the first Gingerdead Man), who are using their old Vietnam connections to ship heroin into the U.S.
Mel Gibson fans might notice the nod to this Shadow Company being part of Air America.
There are also quite a few things we would see again in Die Hard the following year (Murtaugh being bloodied by the end of the movie and wearing a certain white top, Riggs' note to Joshua in the movie's finale, a by-the-book black cop and an unpredictable white cop getting to know each other as they take down heavily armed villains with ulterior motives on Christmas) and common action hero tropes on display (being able to flash a badge and go anywhere, dodge automatic gunfire without moving, choke out villains incredibly fast, chase cars on foot, land from twenty-foot drops without injury, have shootouts in public places without incurring collateral damage, survive being in an explosion radius with only singed clothing, etc.).
Riggs' self-destructive tendencies are given their due respect and coverage, and his partnership with the older Murtaugh sets up a solid character arc for him--relative to the runtime of the average movie--especially considering what they have gone through by the end (the Hunsakers' deaths, our heroes' established, shared military background, their torture by Black Company, the kidnapping and rescue of Murtaugh's oldest daughter, Rhianne, etc.). The action set pieces are mostly well-done, also.
Now for the marks against it.
Even though the actors' age difference is only four years (Gibson was 31 at the time of release, and Traci Wolfe, who plays Rhianne Murtaugh, was 27, and Glover was playing her fifty-year-old father), I found Rhianne's crush on Riggs to be a bit creepy (especially considering information I discovered later that Riggs and Rhianne as characters had a twenty-plus-year age gap).
Then there's the breathe-and-you-won't-hear-it piece of dialogue when the witness' house explodes and Riggs asks Murtaugh if he's a fag because he's pulling off Riggs' burning jacket.
Shortly after that masterfully written exchange, our leads interrogate a group of children of color who ask them if policemen only shoot black people, and instead of refuting the claim or elaborating on gun safety or the justification (or lack thereof) for deadly force...Murtaugh bribes them with ice cream? Good job having the black cop be the one to do this, I guess. But you didn't exactly deny the allegation! Hell, Riggs could have said, "naw; I shot three white guys this morning, jumped a fourth one off a high rise, and drowned another one in a swimming pool before lunch!" He would have sounded crazy, but at least it's evidence against the "cops only kill black people" argument. Not to mention most of the villains in this franchise are white; this time, it was former U.S. Military, in the second one, it's South African Nazis, and in the third one, it's a cop! I mean, Shane Black could have written some kind of message in here to make this classic action movie feel more timeless, but instead he has one character call another character a fag and then literally cops out of a serious conversation with an ice cream bribe. Do you even woke, bruh?
I said earlier that Richard Donner mostly delivers on the action set-pieces, and unfortunately, the exception is the final fight between Riggs and Joshua for "a shot at the title." Instead of Murtaugh cuffing Joshua and reading him his rights as soon as they get the jump on him with the aforementioned note and plowing an unmanned police car through Murtaugh's living room window (which could be grounds for attempted murder, false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, and entrapment charges against our "heroes"), things awkwardly cut to something that looked epic and brutal when viewed on VHS and CRT: an over-edited, epileptically lit fight in the rain between two stunt doubles (the hand-to-hand and grappling shots were the actors fighting, but when things got interesting and Riggs and Joshua went tonfa vs. pipe in the middle of it, it was pretty clear that neither Gibson nor Busey did the weapons fighting because the head-on shots look nothing like them). It's one of the most iconic fights in Hollywood action of its time, but the editing, lighting, and HD ruined it for me.
In the end, everyone knows the arrest is a bust, and Riggs and Murtaugh shoot Joshua to death when he goes for another officer's gun. And if that wasn't enough mixed messaging, the movie ends with our heroes going to Murtaugh's for Christmas dinner, accompanied by the...comedy stylings?...of Riggs' dog slaughtering the family cat offscreen.
While it is an action classic with a better put-together plot than I remember, and it has a ton of big names behind it, the original Lethal Weapon has aged poorly for several reasons and its third act feels both too long (almost half an hour of running, shooting, fighting, car chases, and torture through a desert, an L.A. porn theater and night club--above and below ground--the streets of L.A., and interior and exterior locations of the Murtaugh house) and too rushed (the multiple locations and the incongruous pivot to the illogical and visually painful final fight).
C-
It's immediately apparent that the time for a focus on deep character work has passed (I mean this as a positive), as Lethal Weapon 2 opens in the middle of a car chase between the LAPD (with focus on Riggs, Murtaugh, and a young, skinny Dean Norris) and an Afrikaner suspect who was smuggling a trunkful of Krugerrands. Much like the prolonged finale of the first film, this chase features Riggs pursuing the villain's car on foot. But the feeling of this opening sequence is higher in energy and more polished, with frantic but easy to follow editing and slick banter between the LAPD cast, and you know the ante is up when the opening sequence of a movie ends with automatic weapons and a helicopter escape by the villains.
Despite what negatives I will have to address later, Lethal Weapon 2 is where the series really found its voice in terms of action scenes and comedic writing. The crass, office prank-fueled exchanges that characterize many of the police station scenes in the film series began here. The Three Stooges-inspired dynamic between Riggs, Murtaugh, and Leo Getz began here. And while they were merely good in the first film, the absurd action sequences, the Murtaugh family dynamics, and the ride-or-die, love-hate partnership between Riggs and Murtaugh are just dialed in perfectly to the Franchise Identity setting.
Even the villains make continuity sense, what with the anti-Apartheid stickers seen on Riggs' fridge in the previous film. As I said above, said villains are Afrikaans (white South Africans of Dutch nationality who were responsible for the Apartheid race and gender segregation and attempted Bantu genocide system in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, basically making them a combination of Nazis and the Confederate South) drug smugglers hiding behind their Consolate status to such a campy degree that it became something of a meme.
Depicted in the above meme is Arjin "Aryan" Rudd, played with over-the-top, slimy glee by the late Joss Ackland (The Mighty Ducks and D3, among over a hundred other roles). His right hand man is Pieter "Adolf" Vorstedt (End Of Days' Derrick O'Connor), who has some personal history with Riggs and serves the Mr. Joshua role this time around (with a less prolonged and brutal final fight that is easier to watch than the first film's climax and ends with a more sensational and satisfying death). I love to hate these two!
I have no coherent way to transition into this, but between Rhianne starring in a...father-unapproved commercial, numerous action and suspense sequences that include the iconic "Murtaugh on an exploding toilet" scene and the return of Riggs' dive-roll shot, the introduction of the duo's "how does 'going on three' work?" banter and Leo's "They fuck you at [insert company and/or system of modern convenience here]" rants, a second Chekov device with Riggs' dislocated shoulder, and countless other writing and directing touches that make this series what it is, the amount of action, plot, and character that was included in this movie compared to the first one, which was only two minutes shorter, is impressive. And I haven't even mentioned the politically-charged atmosphere that comes with then-timely messaging on topics like dolphin-safe tuna and the film's clear anti-Apartheid stance as a general theme. In its way, Lethal Weapon 2 was to Apartheid what Rambo: First Blood was to the Vietnam War.
What ages poorly in this regard is, once again, the turn-of-the-decade sensationalism and idolatry of the rogue cop archetype. When there is a system that our "heroes" don't agree with, they can just creatively nope their way around it if the dialogue and stunts are cool enough. It's okay to trespass on sovereign soil, steal evidence, assault people, and cause property damage with a deadly weapon if the bad guys' desk jockey has a funny accent and Riggs cracks a few jokes along the way. If you are an action hero cop and the villains shoot and bomb your friends, kill your wife, drown the potential witness you were sleeping with, and shoot up your new beachfront trailer, it's totally okay to just put your badge in a drawer, over-exercise your Second Amendment rights, and kill multiple foreign government officials in a place where there aren't any witnesses.
Somewhere along the way, it seems pertinent to talk about Riggs' continued streak of questionable romantic behavior. After an underdeveloped potential relationship with his partner's daughter who is twenty-plus years younger than him in the last one, Riggs has moved onto "adorably" stalking (because everything is okay if you look like a young Mel Gibson and qualify everything with a joke and a smile), entrapping, and sexually compromising a potential witness to Arjin's shady international activities named Rika van den Haas (Eighth Wonder lead singer, Patsy Kensit), who winds up fridged by drowning at the hands of Vorstedt, who is, conveniently, also the man who caused the car accident that killed Riggs' wife prior to the first movie.
But it's fine because this is an action movie where the bad guys are rich, mass-murdering, drug-dealing racists, and personally-motivated revenge spree vigilante homicide is always healthy; just like sarcasm!
At least Riggs and Murtaugh's strongly developed partnership (the subtext of which is very much "they'd be gay for each other if one of them wasn't an emotionally damaged horndog and the other wasn't a happily married father of three") gets framed through less--but not non-existent--of a homophobic lens this time around, and Lethal Weapon 2 (and 3) may be the first action movie of its time to have a character survive repeated mentions of their own retirement. And did I mention how much better the action, comedy, and storytelling are here?
It might not have aged well in today's anti-police social climate, and there are a few, head-scratchingly obvious moments where the script relies on coincidence. But that aside, Lethal Weapon 2 may be the franchise at its best.
B-
The cast and crew of the last movie return (minus the casualties of the Arjin group's bomb attacks, helicopter strikes, and hitmen), with Murtaugh (Danny Glover) a week away from retirement and still dodging fatal cop movie tropes. Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) has gone from annoying, money-laundering accountant-savant to annoying real estate agent, and is trying to sell the Murtaugh house in lieu of the family moving after Roger retires. Murtaugh's son, Nick (Damon Hines in his third series appearance, who seems to have hit puberty between films), is friends with a local gang member for reasons that will play into the plot later (much like Leo's new real estate gig, now that I think about it), and this gives writers Jeffrey Boam and Robert Mark Kamen--who took over midway through the scripting of Lethal Weapon 2 when Shane Black backed out over creative differences with the studio, director/producer Richard Donner, and co-executive producer Joel Silver--the opportunity to write some "fellow kids"-awkward dialogue for Murtaugh to try connecting with Nick because Glover is still playing a character who is a decade older than himself, and it's been almost two whole movies since we've heard his iconic, "I'm getting too old for this shit" catchphrase. So, yeah, let's have prominent civil rights activist and multi-award-nominated actor Danny Glover, who was forty-something and playing a fifty-something cop and suburban father of three with a house in L.A. that would probably go for hundreds of millions of dollars in today's market, awkwardly shout "word!" at his character's newly pubescent son. Give these men an Oscar! For being the most likely to incite me to sarcasm!
That got a bit ranty, and I'll have more negatives to say about the film in a moment, but one of the elements of Lethal Weapon 3 where the franchise continues to step up is in the music. Eric Clapton and composers Michael Kamen (possibly writer Robert Kamen's late brother, but I couldn't find anything definitive) and David Sanborn returned to provide the score, but Lethal Weapon 3 is the only entry to date to have what could be considered opening and ending theme songs. Yes, the first film opens with "Jingle Bell Rock" and has a title track of sorts by Honeymoon Suite playing late in the end credits, and Lethal Weapon 2's end credits feature "Cheer Down" by ex-Beatle, George Harrison. But Lethal Weapon 3 is the first to have Clapton involved across the board, beginning with a straight-up opening credits screen (a pretty sick-looking one, too) backed by "It's Probably Me" by Clapton with Sting on lead vocals, and the end credits song is another Clapton collaboration: "Runaway Train" with Elton John.
Unfortunately, the opening credits sequence leads into the opening scene, where we meet the new Riggs. He's still played by Mel Gibson, but in the course of three movies, he's gone from grieving, shellshocked suicide case to borderline sexual predator (but it was okay because he smiled and told jokes and there was a cute doggie and he got catharsis from killing the drug-dealing, racist hitman who murdered his wife and girlfriend?) to now being an example of the worst part of the modern internet: a reckless, know-it-all contrarian. Said opening scene is set at a high-rise that has been evacuated because of a bomb threat, and because this is an action movie, our "heroes" (who are homicide detectives and have no jurisdiction because no one has died...yet) can just flash their badges and join the perimeter. But, because Riggs is now a reckless, know-it-all contrarian asshole and there need to be at least two new flavors of "do we go on three, or is it three, then go?" bicker-banter, he and Murtaugh end up in a parking garage, looking at a car bomb with a stray cat in tow. And because Riggs saw the bomb under Murtaugh's toilet for a few seconds several years ago in the last movie, he thinks he can disarm the much bigger and definitely not "more simplified" car bomb himself, and ends up speeding up the timer to 60fps when he cuts the wrong wire. And because editing, the forty-something Riggs and fifty-something Murtaugh are able to get from that mid-level parking garage to the ground floor and out the front door in around three minutes' time before the building explodes and collapses. But at least there's a post-credits scene that bookends this gag, and...Riggs was...right? The bomb squad showing up moments later possibly means that, had the duo not gone up there themselves and prematurely exploded the bomb, the professionals would have arrived and spent just enough time assessing the situation and scaling the building to then find the bomb just in time to be killed in the explosion and/or building collapse. So...yay for saving the bomb squad's lives?
Nope, they get busted back down to patrol where Riggs...pulls his gun on a jaywalker (Andrew Hill Newman, of the Mannequin movies) to avoid having to write him a ticket?
But then they stumble upon an armored car heist in progress, leading to a really cool armored car chase where Murtaugh teams up with a rather frisky female driver (musical theatre actress Delores Hall) and Riggs does some amazingly edited platforming and some iconic but questionable Mirandizing on the unconscious criminal (an early role for Supernatural and Dexter star Mark Pellegrino) at the end. The Delores stuff and Riggs reading an unconscious man his rights before punching him even more unconscious drag the sequence down for me, but the action itself is on par with the Krugerrand chase that began the last movie.
Things are looking up! So let's catch up with the gang at the Murtaugh house, where Leo can't close the sale because he references the car crash at the end of Lethal Weapon and the "unexpected bomb damage" from the toilet scene in Lethal Weapon 2, but the final nail in the coffin is...this being the third movie in a row that paints Riggs and Murtaugh's relationship in a homophobic light. I mentioned the "what are you? A fag?" line from the first one, but in the second one (during the toilet bomb scene, actually), the police psychiatrist walks in on the two of them when Riggs is examining the bomb--we're supposed to gather that, from her point of view, it looks like something else is going on--and gives them a dirty look before walking out of the room. In this movie, however, the couple who are looking at the house walk in on Riggs and Murtaugh arguing--again, from their angle, it looks like something else was about to happen--and give them a dirty look before storming out of the house. But it's okay because Riggs is wacky and he's going to start eating Milk Bone to help him quit the smoking that he started to accompany--and then replace--his drinking problem! Sarcasm again!
Ticketmaster's Note: We in the real world know that Mel Gibson either did not try eating dog biscuits, or found that they don't work, because of his well-documented history with drugs, alcohol, and his tortured upbringing. I guess I'm more lenient on certain "cancelled" celebrities than others if I can understand where they're coming from. I mean, there's a difference between being Roseanne-meets-Kanye levels of racist (because you're egotistical and crazy and your affiliated party's fringe is cool with it) and being Mel Gibson racist (drunken outbursts because you got arrested while trying to dull traumatic memories of your childhood in a moving vehicle). Gibson acknowledged his behavior as wrong and took steps to legitimately recover his career and to work on himself, rather than going even further over the edge into the realm of extremist conviction like a lot of so-called "red pill conservative" celebrities had done in recent years. And I am able to look at the man and his art separately without the thought of, "I'd enjoy this if the main character wasn't played by a racist and anti-Semite" coloring my opinion.
And yes, I am aware of that ironic phrasing. Pun not intended, and do not give me a pat on the back. You can still do all of that call to action stuff that I mentioned way up at the top, though. Back to the review....
By the way, that is only the first of at least four homophobic jokes at the duo's expense...that I can remember! There's Leo's "don't let the earring fool you" line (apparently, there was some sort of secret fashion code in the 90s where gay men wore earrings on their left ear, but that went over my head as a kid, along with the rest of these), Leo checking Murtaugh's bathtub to see if Riggs is "hiding in there" (giving him a blowjob), Lorna (Riggs' new love interest, whom I will have some good things to say about later, played by Thor's Renee Russo) giving Riggs a dirty look when he refers to cuddling and playing with a male dog as "a guy thing," and Murtaugh thinking Riggs slept with Lorna's father.
Getting back to the positives, unlike some scenes in previous Lethal Weapon entries (the jumper from the first one comes to mind in particular because it had nothing to do with Black Company, but gives insight into Riggs as a character), it turns out that the armored car heist and Nick's new gang friend, Darryl, are connected to a larger criminal enterprise. And that criminal enterprise is one fuck of a doozy to follow.
Corrupt ex-Lieutenant, Jack. Edward. Travis. (yes, that's how his name is said, almost every time, and he is played by Stuart Wilson, who would play Walker in the much-maligned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III the following year) is playing both sides in a time of rampant gang activity, using his LAPD connections to employ catch-&-release ex-cons (one of whom looks and sounds like a tall, skinny George Lucas to me) as labor and muscle to redistribute automatic weapons onto the streets that are loaded with armor-piercing "cop killer" rounds, while his shell construction company builds houses out in the desert to launder his profits, hide his distribution activities (which he also does in abandoned subway tunnels?), and provide "safe" housing for suburbanites who are being endangered by the increase in gang activity that he helps perpetuate. I'm not even sure half of that is correct, but I'm impressed by the scale and bullshit-meets-batshit intricacy of it all, so I'm still weighing it as more of a positive. Also, Stuart Wilson gives Travis this matter-of-fact, insanely give-no-fux line delivery that fits with previous Lethal Weapon villains but is also perfect for how absurd this movie can be.
Not that it's all action and murder and mean-spirited gay jokes; Lethal Weapon 3 has its serious moments, too. At one point, the guys are about to have lunch and witness some suspicious activity that leads to a gunfight with the gang members, one of whom Murtaugh fatally wounds before discovering that it is his son's friend, Darryl. Murtaugh is then not seen for a portion of the movie, and we later learn that he took time off from work to go on a drinking binge on his boat, which provides a solid role-reversal moment where Riggs shows up and has to pull him out of his dark place by reminding him of their partnership and the importance of his family. It's difficult to watch at any age because it's too dark for the comedic side of intoxication to feel right, but also uncomfortably accurate, which makes it...good? And again, the thematic reversal of this scene is an underrated highlight of the film series.
I also think that Lethal Weapon 3 has the best romantic subplot for Riggs. The writers try to make the Rhianne thing work as a recurring background gag (the only recurring gag they accomplish here is when I think about that twenty-something-year age gap and I have to re-eat my most recent meal with a side of bile as a result), but it's clear from the first scene they share that Renee Russo's Lorna Cole (who is an Internal Affairs Sergeant, creating some Moonlighting-esque romantic tension with Riggs as they try to collaborate on the Jack Travis case without killing each other or ripping each other's clothes off...too often) is the perfect romantic counterpart for Riggs. They both love dogs and the Stooges, their banter is electrochemically charged and smartly written, their sex scene (which is foreplayed by a game of battle scar one-upsmanship and casual disrobing) makes sense in contrast to the one with Rika in the previous movie, and they can both kick major ass. Russo was trained for the film's fight scenes by the same guy who trained Gibson and Busey for their fight in the first movie, and said fight scenes almost make you feel bad for the villains because they're a mix of martial arts, women's self-defense techniques, and using whatever the environment has on hand to cause as much damage and hesitation by the opponent(s) as possible. They put the final fights in both previous films to shame, and Renee Russo gives her performance so much personality and gusto, and I love it!
What I don't love (besides the insensitive jokes, the mean, contrarian direction they went with Riggs, and the villain's plan not quite making sense) is the final fight. That isn't to say it's a bad fight. The gun battle and ensuing pyrotechnics at the Mesa Verde housing project that precede it are spectacular, and provide a thrilling and dangerous setting for the confrontation. But for a fight to be considered good or bad, it has to have motivation, and it has to exist. Riggs and Travis barely exchange blows with the exception of Riggs making a desperate tackle before Travis subdues him and retreats to a nearby bulldozer, forcing Riggs to use the villain's own armor-piercing ammunition to defeat him, which is obvious but appropriately ironic writing. In comparison to Riggs' previous fights (the brutal but hard-to-watch dark mirror fight with Joshua, and the thematically satisfying battle with Vorstedt), the choreography is almost nonexistent, and Riggs' motivation for wanting to end Travis and destroy his operation (Travis' men killed a young cop named Edwards, who got ample screentime and dialogue for a background character, and is played by Forever Young's Jason Rainwater) feels like the writers just did a flipped morality copy-paste of Murtaugh's earlier loss (the Darryl shooting) so Riggs could continue to be the Lethal Weapon and get one more fight in. As a result, it comes off as empty and diminishes the impact of Murtaugh's actions and grief (not to mention Darryl's funeral, which was backed by the saddest Boyz II Men song ever and overtly gave Murtaugh a call to action to bring down Travis' operation). I don't know if performance appropriation is an official name for a thing, or even if it's the right official name for this particular thing, but whatever it should be called, Danny Glover gave his heart, soul, and asshole to the Murtaugh role here, and the script appropriated the fuck out of its significance so two white guys could play grabass in a burning building?
Great action spectacle on all fronts, top-notch music, amazingly acted new characters, and props for finally getting Riggs into a functional relationship. But looking critically at the incessant mean-spiritedness of the so-called humor and the lazy mechanics of the writing, fuck this movie with a bulletproof vest on, and don't forget to buy some condoms.
D+
As bad as I ultimately judged Lethal Weapon 3 to be, it did enough right that it should have been where the series ended, what with Riggs finally in a stable relationship and Murtaugh relatively comfortable with his place in the world. We didn't need a Lethal Weapon 4, but money decreed that we get one, and it only took another six years before that happened. Can you believe it's been twenty-five years since this came out?
Given the Asian villains (led by a stoic and intimidating Jet Li in his first international film role) and the introduction of a loud, comedy-relief, black sidekick (Chris Rock as Detective Lee Butters, but honestly, he's just playing Chris Rock in a police uniform most of the time), I can be forgiven for thinking that Lethal Weapon 4 was a cash-grab sequel meant to capitalize on the success of that year's Rush Hour. But upon a deeper dive, I discovered that, in all respects of its troubled production (a double-handful of writing credits, last-minute rewrites and reshoots, filming without a written ending, etc.) and release, Lethal Weapon 4 came first. If anything, it's more likely a big-screen capitalization on Nash Bridges, a popular buddy-cop TV series that had reached the middle of its run at the time of this movie's release, also had an ongoing Chinese Triad plot, and got its own "I'm getting too old for this shit" movie in 2021. Believe it or not, Lethal Weapon 4 was almost a back-to-back double-filming and its original script eventually became Die Hard: With A Vengeance (my second favorite Die Hard).
But here we are instead, watching Riggs and Murtaugh discover their respective father- and grandfather-hood while a maniac in an armored welding suit with a machine gun and a flamethrower shoots and burns their co-workers to death in the background because no one bothered to save any of the armor-piercing ammo from the last movie. Ultimately, we get civil rights activist and multi-award-nominated actor Danny Glover stripping down to a pair of Valentine's Day boxers and making his idea of bird noises so Riggs can shoot the criminal's pressure valve and turn him into a human rocket that blows up a nearby 76 gas station because these last two movies have a thing against Big Petroleum and don't understand how positive product placement works (in Lethal Weapon 3's finale, Riggs siphons gas from a pickup truck loaded with guns and ammunition, and comments negatively on the taste of Exxon, raising all manner of questions on Riggs' possible status as a Sherlock Holmes-level fossil fuel sommelier). Come to think of it, Leo's first ever rant in Lethal Weapon 2 boiled down to the writers shitting on Subway's drive-thru service, so maybe it's product placement in general that they don't understand? Whatever the case, we're not out of the opening scene yet before we get our first homophobic line of the movie, and Murtaugh's boxers are certain to be the subject of ridicule and office grabassery in a scene at the police station later because Riggs tricking him into roundhouse-kicking the water cooler in the last one and Murtaugh getting a flower arrangement from 1-800-Condoms in Lethal Weapon 2 (because everyone watched Rhianne's commercial) has established a predictable theme.
And what would a Lethal Weapon sequel be without the guys accidentally stumbling across a major case in their down-time in the second scene of the movie?
Apparently, someone thought it was a good idea to give Leo Getz a Private Investigator license and a gun permit, and he somehow caught a live shark and got it into the back of Murtaugh's boat (which got ample screentime and dialogue mentions for a background object over the last three movies, for reasons that will shortly be tragic). Thankfully, someone else thought it was a good idea to give Joe Pesci a Razzie nomination for this movie.
Anyway, following some admittedly powerful dialogue between Riggs and Murtaugh about their respective relationships (with emphasis on Riggs' conflicted feelings over his wedding ring and his memories of his first wife), that aforementioned stumbling happens when Murtaugh's boat is nearly sideswiped by a freighter at the exact moment when suspiciously gunshot-like sounds can be heard. Riggs boards the freighter and gets his ass kicked by a real martial artist while Leo and Murtaugh scramble to safety in the now single-shark-infested waters below. As is usually the case in these early conflicts, the villains get away. But Riggs soon discovers that the freighter's cargo hold is sardine-packed with Chinese immigrants who are destined for such unsavory futures as indentured slavery and falsely documented, coerced voters in a rigged election (which soon ceases to be the case when Jet Li's character and his entourage cause the corrupt politician to...permanently lose his train of thought, so to speak). One family of particular note (the Hongs) wind up in the care of the Murtaughs when they stow away in the lifeboat that he and Leo used to escape the shark earlier.
Murtaugh has a sweet bonding moment with the elder Hong (Eddie Ko), but as so often happens in this series, that qualifies as ample screentime and dialogue for a background character, and so proves tragic later on. But aside from that, the Lethal Weapon standard for amazingly crafted action scenes (with the exception of some more obvious stunt doubling because Mel Gibson's stand-in has darker, shorter hair, a younger face, and a noticeably narrower frame), and the small arc Riggs goes through in reconciling his feelings about marriage that makes for a heart-warming final scene and turns the credits into a pictorial love letter for the franchise thus far, Lethal Weapon 4 is very much an "everything and everyone is getting old, and it's time for the new generation" movie to an almost Cousin Oliver degree of fatigued desperation. Riggs can't fight or pursue criminals with the same physicality as before (the stunts and fights still look cool, though), the jokes are tired (the same old homophobia dragged out into a recurring subplot, workplace pranks amped to psychological bullying levels in one instance, multiple liar-revealed running gags, the previous film's promotion gag elevated to new degrees of absurdism by making them loophole Captains instead of reinstated Sergeants, Leo being paired with Butters to freshen up his "they fuck you at the..." material, and over-reliance on obvious Asian stereotypes), Leo's "okay, okay, okay" tick is now replaced with "whatever" to appeal to the youth three years after Clueless was popular, Riggs' chemistry with Lorna doesn't have the same spark it did in the previous film, and after thwarting ex-military drug-runners, a South African crime syndicate, and a dirty cop/arms dealer/real estate scammer with an operation so convoluted that it makes my brain hurt, we've...escalated?...to human trafficking and counterfeit Chinese currency so a Triad assassin can get his brother back.
Hot take, but this would have been a better movie if it were a shorter movie (this is the first Lethal Weapon to clock in at over two hours), and not a Lethal Weapon movie. Given a few tweaks in the writing, Wah Sing Ku (Jet Li) could have been the main character in a story of a master martial artist driven to drastic criminal actions (holding a money plate engraver's family hostage and killing his expendable associates as a means to printing counterfeit money that he would use to pay off the corrupt general in custody of his brother). Even the behavior of Riggs and Murtaugh in the final fight (perhaps the best and most brutal in the series)--fighting him two-on-one with automatic weapons and foreign objects because they don't stand a chance otherwise--makes them feel like stand-ins for high-level henchmen in a different movie. But we didn't get that movie, or Die Hard 3 (because that came out three years before this one), or a sequel to Rapid Fire as was originally intended. We got Lethal Weapon: We've Gotten Too Old 4 This Shit.
However (because putting shit between two buts is a good way to get demonitized), when the drama, action, and comedy do hit, you can feel how right the landing is, so I can't just blindly fail it like I wanted to when I saw it for the first time at the age of fourteen.
D-
And now, for some things that I misremembered or misheard from each movie.
Starting with the first two movies, I remember thinking the first Lethal Weapon's plot was a lot more random when I was a kid/preteen, and because Murtaugh watches video tapes in both, my mind jumbled together Amanda Hunsaker's adult film with Rhianne's condom commercial and the Murtaugh honeymoon video from Lethal Weapon 2 to make some important piece of evidence as to Black Company's identity that gave Mr. Joshua more of a connection to Riggs and Murtaugh (rather than being some random, American Sniper-type dark mirror villain for Riggs to bounce off of). But as I'm writing this, with the series pretty fresh in my mind, I struggle to put into words exactly how that imagined "important piece of evidence" fit anything. Speaking of Mr. Joshua, there's a piece of dialogue that I misunderstood from Lethal Weapon about him killing a man with blonde hair and dimples (Rhianne's unseen boyfriend), and for the longest time, I thought Joshua (who could also be said to fit that description) was Rhianne's boyfriend as some kind of "she was dating the villain all along" twist cliche. Now, I struggle with whether or not that idea creeps me out more than Riggs dating her. And that's with the knowledge that Gary Busey is twelve years older than Mel Gibson.
Moving onto Lethal Weapon 3, I remember thinking vividly and for decades (perhaps because of Speed or Super Mario Bros., the poor video quality of the time, and Stuart Wilson's campy, matter-of-fact performance) that Dennis Hopper played Jack Travis. They obviously look and sound nothing alike, but that's kid-brain for you.... Also, there are two misheard lines from Riggs in Lethal Weapon 3 that probably qualify for eggcorn status, and have persisted in memory for as long as the Jack Travis casting thing. First is when Riggs finishes Mirandizing the fractionally conscious Billy (Mark Pellegrino) after the armored car chase, he punches him out and says, "Back to bed; back to bed." But I always thought he said, "Activate! Activate!" It's somehow funnier than the actual line and fits more with the forced escalation of Riggs' mean insanity in this third entry; at least, those are my thoughts. The other misheard line is a similar case of being funnier and more fittingly insane than the real line, and comes when Riggs is siphoning gas from the pickup truck during the last shootout. He gets some of the gas in his mouth, coughs, and spits it out with disgust, name-dropping it as "Exxon." As I said previously, this raises all kinds of questions surrounding how Riggs would know what Exxon gasoline tastes like and whether or not the writers understood how product placement works, and as such, it is funny in its own right. But I always thought he said, "excellent," which has a more obvious, surface-level irony based on his reaction to the taste immediately prior and the sarcastic-sounding delivery of the line, and feels more in tune with the previously established wackiness of "Riggs was a smoker and drinker, and now he eats dog biscuits; he'll eat anything!" Which has a heretofore unrealized level of darkness to it, considering that "anything" included bullets in the first movie.
If or when I watch this franchise again in an era where buddy cop movies wrap around to being cool again (but hopefully not in an era where subtle but noticeable and increasingly constant homophobic "humor" and sensationalized rogue police behavior don't do the same, pigs can fly, Goku gets a win on Superman, cats and dogs live together without mass hysteria--which sounds like the title of a Troma horror movie about a giant vagina monster because I had a 5Hour Energy shot at ten PM--and I can eat my cake and have it, too because bitterly sarcastic is now the default setting of my dark and absurd sense of humor), I think I will still prefer these misheard lines to the originals.
And finally, believe it or not, "I'm getting too old for this shit" is not Roger Murtaugh's most prominent catch phrase. It's his first and most iconic. But he only says it in half of the movies in the franchise, and there are almost three movies' worth of runtime between his first utterance at the beginning of Lethal Weapon and his first utterance midway through Lethal Weapon 4. Murtaugh's real catchphrase that he says at least once in every movie? "Go spit!" I can see why the other line caught on instead....
But not finally.
Its sense of comedic timing (relying too heavily and frenetically on that uncomfortable extra step that takes advantage of the horseshoe principle and makes most Saturday Night Live skits a slog to watch) isn't for everyone and can feel like overload, but it exists in that era of spoof and parody between Airplane and Scary Movie where genre parody hasn't entirely been consumed by film-specific parody and short-lived pop-culture references. It is a near direct parody of the original trilogy and has its fair share of references, over-the-top gross-out humor, and film parody salad going on, but the writing is still punny and whip-smart, the background is a re-watch buffet of gags and guest stars on par with the average Mel Brooks or Jim Abrahams joint of its time, the action/buddy cop genre parody and random absurdity are as prominent as the film-specific stuff, and you get Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson in the Riggs and Murtaugh roles with Tim Curry doing a silly accent as the Joshua/Vorstedt-esque villain.
I only re-watched enough to get the flavor of it because I'm experiencing franchise burnout and academic procrastination pressures, so I can't give it an honest letter grade. Also, I had to stop because my face hurt and my family kept checking on me for signs of Joker Venom poisoning. But if you're looking for some quality 90s spoof action, this is worth the watch.
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Ticketmaster,
A Bit Absurd,
Jingle Bell,
Jingle Bell,
Jingle Bell Splat!
Go spit, Riggs!
And to all a good night.
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