Sometimes in your life, Ed Travis will send you DVDs in the mail. It’s a rare and wondrous occasion, like seeing a unicorn mounting Sasquatch. Or, you know, not like that, at all, but you get my point. Sometimes that DVD will be for a movie about a little girl who has a cock and murders a bunch of people at summer camp. Other times, that DVD will be for the Lethal Weapon series of films.
I realized that I’d never actually seen any of these movies, start to finish — a massive gap in my cinematic lore, given the popularity, influence, and long-standing affection that the series still maintains after all these years. So I decided to watch each and every one of the suckers, writing about each film after I’d finished.
The results, well, the results you can read right now. Or not, I guess, you could wait until tomorrow. But today or tomorrow, those are your only options. Them’s the breaks.
Anyway:
LETHAL WEAPON
Shane Black sold the screenplay for Lethal Weapon when he was 22 years old. Conversely, Richard Donner was well into his 60s at the time of production and had been a steady Hollywood hand for decades. Joel Silver fell somewhere between the two, riding a fresh wave of success off the backs of hits like Commando or ambitious misfires like Streets of Fire.
Lethal Weapon is very clearly the work of several diverse cooks, but some act of alchemy allowed the movie to not only survive but succeed. You have Black attacking the script with a young man’s cocksure confidence, his script eschewing conventional procedural structures for a more episodic flow and character-based sequences. Donner keeps an even keel of the film’s tone, letting the script and cast range from manic emotion to wild comedy to hard-hitting action without breaking step. And Silver lends the film his studio-slick sheen, the blockbuster surface hiding a film that is a good deal sadder and smarter than its modern reputation might suggest.
Like its 80s ilk such as Die Hard, Rambo, or Predator, the franchising and meme-ization (not a word) of Lethal Weapon distracts from what is actually a genuinely strong, at times even great film. The movie treats its themes of grief and redemption with utmost sincerity and conviction, spending as much, if not more, time showing Riggs and Murtaugh plunging emotional depths as they do plugging baddies with bullets.
In classic Black (and pulp) tradition, Riggs may be a hyper-capable badass with glorious, glorious hair of a kind not seen since Samson in his prime, but he’s also a wretched mess of a man, barely able to claw his way out of bed in the morning. Gibson’s performance takes on an added edge now that we know he’s, you know, a batshit fucking loon, and that real element in danger that Riggs possesses gives this film an edge over all the mismatched buddy movies to come dribbling down the development drain since this thing hit.
Similarly, you’re not getting a more rock-solid base of decency than Danny Glover. While it sometimes seems like he’s stressing a little too hard to keep up with his Aussie-accented co-star’s energy, Glover exudes a sense of innate goodness that gives the film an actual moral compass. We may be fascinated by Riggs and his demons, but it is Murtaugh and his family that need to come out of the film unscathed for a victory to actually count.
Die Hard also comes to mind given the pacing of the film. In today’s age of ADD studio product, it can be jarring to see what it looks like when a film is willing to take its time. Die Hard famously doesn’t fire a single bullet until over twenty minutes in, and Lethal Weapon takes its sweet time putting Riggs and Murtaugh together. Even after they’ve been paired up, it’s not until well over an hour that the movie’s central mystery starts getting investigated with relish.
Lethal Weapon loses its way a bit as it wraps up, the necessities of being an 80s movie meaning that most of the characterization goes out the window in the third act to focus on endless car chases and gun battles. But the movie still manages to bring it all home with the ending (literally) with the final brawl between Riggs and Mr. Joshua (Gary Busey, at the start of his “I’M GARY BUSEY!” phase, which has not since ceased in over twenty years) serving as both a fist-pumping bit of violence and a strongly motivated character sequence.
So I think I get why a certain generation reveres this movie so much. It’s legitimately good.
LETHAL WEAPON 2
The movie opens with that Looney Tunes music playing, you know which one I mean? And that sets a tone for how Lethal Weapon 2 goes about its business. The first movie was about two very real, very broken men going through a believable journey, the second one is about two deities unleashing the wrath of fucking God on Los Angeles ne’er do wells. The first movie opened on Riggs and Murtaugh in separate moments of quiet unease; this one opens with them screaming down the highway in a high octane car chase. By the time the chase has ended, there’s been a helicopter involved, cars wrecked, storefronts exploded, and more rounds of ammunition fired than in the entire first movie.
Shit’s getting crazy, is the point I’m making here.
The shit may be getting crazy, but Riggs has had his own mania meter dialed way back. I actually like that, as it would’ve felt like lazy bullcrap to have him back to being a suicidal mess after everything that happened in the first movie. It’s always good when sequels actually follow through on character growth and changes, instead of taking the coward’s way out and just re-setting to the status quo (looking at you Ghostbusters 2). Here, he gets to be crazy and wild and maintain that glorious, glorious hair, but it’s tempered with genuine emotional stability.
You can tell how the perception of Riggs changed by how LW1 and LW2 treat the police shrink played by Mary Ellen Trainor. In the first movie, she was the only one who understood that Riggs was truly crazy and was trying to warn everybody. She was like the old guy in slasher movies warning the newest batch of skimpily-dressed meat to stay away from Crystal Lake or Texas or wherever the specially-themed murderer of the day was setting up shop. In the second movie, she’s there to be laughed at and humiliated by Riggs et al. for daring to poo-poo his awesomeness.
That same sort of neutering goes into the conception of the villains. LW1’s bad guys were all Vietnam veterans, like Riggs and Murtaugh, and their rigidly formal behavior and open psychopathy were nicely juxtaposed to our heroes, who suffered the same traumas but sought to channel that into good. The movie never had anyone make a speech to point out the parallels, but it was there and it gave the film a little bit of weight against which it could tell its ridiculous story.
Here, well, the bad guys might as well have “WE ARE EVIL. DO NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT MURDERING US BY THE LITERAL DOZENS” on their foreheads. That’s a lot of words, though, they may have to shorten the message to get it to fit on a forehead. Point is, they’re racist, snobby, and foreign, like a triple threat of things that will make Americans long to see them die. They even, for some dumb fucking reason, add a backstory that one of the anonymous henchmen was the secret murderer of Riggs’ wife.
That ridiculous-ization (not a word) takes on actual physical form in Joe Pesci’s Leo Getz, who I understand becomes an entrenched part of the series from here on out. I actually liked him here, and I was especially pleased to see that Pesci wasn’t just playing his usual quivering ball of pint-sized rage. Getz’s thing is the opposite; he’s so chipper and eager please that he ends becoming insufferable.
It’s a goofy character, one who pushes the movie into straight-up comedy in several scenes (“THEY FUCK YOU AT THE DRIVE-THRU!”) but I ended up liking the guy and being weirdly moved by how much affection he had for Murtaugh and Riggs. That warmth matches the whole victory lap feeling of the entire movie which, while making it a lesser film than the first almost by default, isn’t ever unpleasant. Just take the scenes of Riggs hanging out with the Murtaugh family, and the little details like him having a designated spot for his clothes. The movie never calls attention to these bits but they are almost grotesquely emotional following the harrowing pain of the first film.
And I get why they had to push the comedic angle and tone Riggs back and make all those sort of moves. There’s no way a film series that stays consistently in tone with the first film could have gone to four movies (Shane Black famously tried to kill off Riggs at the end of this film. The studio balked and Black walked), so these choices were probably not only inevitable but necessary. And as far as this sort of thing goes, Lethal Weapon 2 is studio popcorn, but it is popcorn prepared and served with great skill.
Everyone’s in basic agreement that these two are good, though, so let’s push on to the rest of the series, where things get a little more divisive.
LETHAL WEAPON 3
Fucking Joe Pesci is fucking blonde in this.
The hair does set the tempo for the third movie, though, as the Lethal Weapon series doesn’t so much step as Chevy-Chase-pratfall-style lunge into the realm of cartoonization (not a word) with nary a backward glance. Last movie it bothered me how much of the nuance and depth had been stripped out of both Riggs and Murtaugh and the world they inhabited. Here, well, we’ll get into it more as we go but it is truly shocking just how much this series has changed.
And, hey, change can be good. As I said about Lethal Weapon 2, I like that these characters are allowed to grow and change from where they started. Having given up pistol-sucking and booze-drinking, Riggs is now trying to quit smoking, he’s cleaned up some more and (in the Director’s Cut, anyway) building a house where his trailer was before the bullets and the explosions and the whatnot. Murtaugh’s age is showing more and more, and he’s ready to walk away. By this point the duo are regarded as a beloved fixture of the police force, with everyone cheerfully acknowledging them as an inseparable double act. Leo Getz is now referred to as being “family” by Riggs and Murtaugh, even as they can’t stop screwing with him. The Lethal Weapon series, which began as a thing of black-humored pulp, now feels like something that wouldn’t feel out of place as a weekly series on TBS or something.
Probably the most telling behind the scenes detail is that this one was shot by Jan de Bont, a veteran cinematographer with credits to his name like the original Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon 3’s look is very much descended from that lens-flaring metal sheen masterpiece.
But the problem is that this amplified ‘movie-ness’ continues to sap away from the humanity that was what separated Lethal Weapon (and, tellingly, Die Hard) from the roided out killfests of its 80s brethren. The Murtaugh house used to seem like a house that people actually inhabited, with anti-Apartheid posters stuck to the wall, piles of laundry and papers scattered about the place, and a genuinely lived-in feel. Now it looks like a set that people walk through on their way to other sets.
In the first movie, when the Murtaughs busted in on Roger in the tub, it was a funny little moment. When this movie recreates the bit, they turn it into an actual comedy bit, coupled with a long dramatic moment before swerving right into another comedy bit. And the whole time this scene is going on and on, you just have to imagine that all of Roger’s kids are just hanging out by the tub while li’l Roger is waggling around in the water like a loose strand of chocolate coated seaweed.
And that lack of reality is a problem. Without a tether to believable humanity, Riggs and Murtaugh more and more become figures of schtick. Riggs is now just an asshole who willfully drags innocents and loved ones into needless danger. And Murtaugh, poor Murtaugh, just gets more and more pathetic. 90% of Glover’s lines in this movie consist of yelling “RIGGGGGGGGS!” while he bugs his eyes out. The nadir is probably an emotional confrontation on Roger’s boat, a scene that feels utterly empty and false, no matter how moist Gibson and Glover’s eyes get or how loud they perform their lines.
The cartoonification (still not a word) makes more sense when you consider that this and the second movie were both co-written by Jeffery Boam. Boam’s probably more known for his work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a very fun movie which similarly rehashed its superior predecessor with much broader characters and much less narrative cohesion.
(Sidenote: I have a theory that Last Crusade is the reason Indiana Jones never turned into the American James Bond he was so clearly meant to be. By locking down his back story, rehashing Sallah and Marcus Brody, and reiterating the Nazis as the villains for Indiana Jones, it meant that any attempts to shake things up with new cast members or villains would feel wrong. I have a suspicion that if Boam’s script had changed things up even a little bit more, we might have a few more Indy movies, with or without Ford, Lucas or Spielberg. But anyway…)
The first two movies were shaggy, this one’s straight-up slack. Rene Russo is on hand to be an ice queen until the moment when she sees Gibson’s glorious, glorious locks, at which point they fall in love. Stuart Wilson (“Dr. Hatcher, noooooo”) is fun as the gleefully vicious bad guy, which makes it a shame that he vanishes from the film for extended chunks of time. The script even misses an easy outlet for resonance with regard to Wilson: he’s a former cop who turned his back on the job because he thought it had no future, whereas Riggs and Murtaugh are reconciled to the fact that they don’t exist without the job (a better movie would have created tension between Riggs realizing he might not need the job to save and define him at the same time that Murtaugh grapples with how much he does need the job. This is not the movie to do this). The movie never actually gets into any of that, preferring to have Wilson play his villain as a cackling cartoon, unloading thousands of rounds of bullets with deeply inconsistent penetration ability (they’ll slice through a bulldozer like butter, but only when a bad guy is driving it).
And maybe that lack of reality is what this series needed to survive. In 1992, the Rodney King riots burned through American streets like a napalm wind borne on the back of racial outrage. Less than two weeks later, here was a movie where LAPD break into a guy’s house and wave a commandeered UZI in front of said guy’s face. Seconds later, the cops torture another guy in a ‘funny’ scene, using the rear wheel of a car and the threat of ripping off the suspect’s face like Geena Davis in Beetlejuice except bloody and with murder.
Two years after this, de Bont’s directorial debut would hit. That movie? Speed, a movie I can no longer think of without hearing the “Speed Bus!” music cue from Bob’s Burgers. Not only would that movie also feature an action sequence involving an incomplete bridge, but it would cement “Die Hard On A __” as the defining action movie trend of the decade. Speed replaced tough guys with pretty people, and swapped out grim-faced men struggling through a violent world with snappy dialogue (written by an uncredited Joss Whedon) and an ironic smirk. Only a few years into its life, the Lethal Weapon series was already something of a relic.
LETHAL WEAPON 4
There’s a six year gap between Lethal Weapon 4 and the previous movie, making Murtaugh and Riggs feel even more outdated than they already did. The time of the super-cop had largely passed and the action movie was beginning to undergo one of its regularly scheduled mutations. One month after LW4 hit theaters, Blade would waltz into fray. While something of a false-start for the soon-to-dominate superhero subgenre, Blade would create the visual template for modern superhero films, a style that Bryan Singer would more than slightly crib for his first X-Men movie. And only one year after Blade, The Matrix would storm the lobby of cinematic consciousness, forever rewriting American action cinema.
To the credit of everyone involved, LW4 seems to be aware of how outdated the series has become, and the film acts accordingly. In keeping with the general arc for the series, Riggs has gotten even more toned down (and shorn himself of that glorious, glorious hair) and is now expecting a baby with Rene Russo. He doesn’t wantonly endanger himself or others as much anymore, is out of breath a lot, gets beat up more, and has trouble getting it up without the aid of medication (I made that last one up, but he’s getting old, is the point).
Murtaugh has even less to do than in the other movies, but at least he’s not spending all his time bugging his eyes out going, “RIGGGGGGGGGS!” He does it only most of the time. Glover gets saddled with a gay panic subplot that has aged really, really poorly, but he still manages to maintain his dignity and hit some nice notes. There’s a great scene where Riggs confesses to Murtaugh how much his age is starting to take a toll, and Glover’s eyes tell you so much about how much it both pains and delights him to see the younger man getting hit with this sort of crisis.
Donner and new screenwriter Channing Gibson (no relation) do a better job at handling tone than in the last couple movies. I’m sure it irked people that this one is almost entirely comedic, but it works much better as a whole than whipsawing between broad comedy and shirt-rending melancholy the way LW3 did. The story is a nonsensical mess even by the standards of the last two movies, but, again, the lighter tone helps ease the narrative bumps.
In a lot of ways, LW4 feels like a precursor to the era of Old Man Action movies that we are living in right now, where everyone from Sly to Arnie to Liam Neeson and even Michael Caine set the canes aside to bust out some shakeycam fu on the young ‘uns. And since I enjoy those movies, I liked seeing Murtaugh and Riggs feeling like they are totally out of step with their own film series. That jibes nicely with the trend of Old Man Action, which tends to work doubly off of audiences’ preordained affection for the characters/performers on screen. Other movies would hit those sort of beats with much greater success, but there’s still a great deal of emotional resonance to be found in seeing Martin Riggs realize he can’t be the lethal weapon anymore.
All that said, the mixture still feels off. Pesci’s back and he’s not blonde any more, thank the fucking Lord. But he’s not really playing Leo Getz at all. He’s playing “JOE PESCI!” pop culture sensation and pre-Internet meme. How he got through this entire movie without redoing the “Do I amuse you?” speech is anyone’s guess. Probably they had to cut it for time.
After all, they clearly couldn’t bring themselves cut any of the Chris Rock comedy rants. Now, I was expecting to cringe through Rock’s scenes here, as he’s one of those geniuses that Hollywood never seemed to understand how to write for. He’s actually good in the movie, and Donner and Gibson (no, the other one) thankfully didn’t write his Detective Butters (ugh) as some sort of clown. Rock plays the role mostly straight and does a good job, which makes it all the more odd when he’ll go off on Chris Rock-esque rants about cell phones or whatever. He does get to call Joe Pesci a “fucking leprechaun” which is awesome, but this is exactly the sort of nothing role that would drive Rock to focusing mainly on movies that he either wrote and directed or produced, besides appearing in the occasional American masterwork, such as Pootie Tang.
I was also expecting to groan my way through another movie wasting Jet Li, but it isn’t actually as bad as that. He’s given very little to do (and having the villains be Chinese affords the film a number of opportunities to make “ha ha, Asians” jokes, jokes which have only gotten trebly uncomfortable given what’s become of Gibson) but Li’s such a star he’s still able to make his bad guy the most interesting person on screen most of the time, even with only a smattering of lines. It’s all in the way he holds himself, the way he uses the tiniest bits of body language or change of expression to show you what he’s thinking.
Credit to Donner, he also does a much better job than you’d expect at letting Li fight. They shoot him wide, letting you see Li’s full body as he spins, kicks and leaps. You’d think that’d be self-explanatory, but directors still continue to fuck up this sort of Action 101 with Li. Here, when he punts a pregnant woman in the face, Donner makes sure you see every inch of Li in action. The film also gives him numerous chances to beat the shit out of both Gibson (yes, that one) and Glover. You have to accept the ridiculousness of those two managing to land punches in the final fight, which is the most unbelievable thing in this franchise yet, but Donner largely does right by Jet.
Of course, this being an American movie, every time an Asian person walks on screen there’s a bunch of gongs and windpipes and shit. Baby steps, I guess.
I don’t know if they intended LW4 as the end of the series or if they hoped to keep going with these characters afterwards, but there’s a definite last-act-of-Unforgiven tenor to the film, albeit dressed up in the ridiculous coating of this series. The end of the film especially has a strong feeling of goodbye, not only with the big family photo but with the montage of pictures taken from all four films. It feels like Donner et al. acknowledging that the time has come to send Murtaugh and Riggs out to pasture.
And maybe it’s just because so many people had warned me off about this film, but it’s not a bad send off. Many action characters get brought back until the point of embarrassment (coughTerminatorcoughcough) so I’m glad to see that Riggs and Murtaugh got a sendoff that was loud and goofy and big-hearted and more destructive than was probably reasonable or necessary. Anything else would have felt wrong.