WHY CAN'T WE BE FRIENDS?

Lethal Weapon 3 was one of the first movies I saw through a critical lens. I had, to that point, liked movies and not liked movies, but never really got into why. A while before, I had had the experience of watching The Addams Family movie and thinking to myself, “Wow, this plot is really stupid.” Then, in California visiting a friend of my parents (a professional writer), we happened to go out to the movies one night, and the only thing playing was The Addams Family, and as we were sitting waiting for it to start, my parents' friend asked me “So you've already seen this. Did you like it?” and I replied, “Yes, it's fun, but the plot is really stupid.” When the movie was done, he smiled at me and said, “You were right about the plot.” This is not just a Fisher Price My First Critical Assessment story, though; proud as I was of myself for noticing something like that, I started doing it more often, bringing us, relevantly, to Lethal Weapon 3, which I walked out of going, “Jesus Christ, that was really fucking stupid. The gang stuff was like they were trying to rip off Boyz N The Hood, except they fucked up because they're a studio and John Singleton actually cared about the movie he was making and getting stuff right.”

Yes, I developed my love for the word “fuck” at a very young age, but let's look at that again. A 13 year old boy walked out of a Lethal Weapon movie and thought it was stupid. If you do the math, and think about how stupid an action movie has to be for a 13 year old boy—who, despite a burgeoning erudition and an intellect that even then was considered quite fierce, was still a 13 year old boy—to find it stupid . . . yeah, if you're staring off into middle distance and exhaling slowly, I don't blame you.

Lethal Weapon 3 is a classic case of a franchise losing an accurate sense of where it came from. The first Lethal Weapon movie, it cannot be overstated, was an action movie with a handful of dumb jokes and funny lines. It was not a goofball stupid fucknut screwball comedy pratfall fucking thing with explosions. Also, the first two movies featured truly evil villains whose villainy had international implications. They were, in short, grown-ass man Evil White Guys In Suits. The villain in Lethal Weapon 3 is fucking bland. He's an ex-cop gun dealer developer manqué. Sure he might deal with some big-timers in the gun business, but he himself is a low-level dickface who, sure, kills some people and is not a nice person . . . but he isn't a proper Evil White Guy. He's more of a Mildly Unpleasant Caucasian, in the grand scheme of things.

The first two movies, bizarrely, managed to seem more realistic despite the fact that the Evil White Guys all had helicopters with machine gun mounts that they could fly around Malibu and downtown Los Angeles with no one noticing and massive armies of mercenaries capable of feats of badassery such as scaring Ed O'Ross (Ed O'Ross was fucking Viktor Rosta, okay? You scare him, eres chingón, 'mano) in the nightclub scene in the first movie where Gary Busey does his Liddy lighter trick. So for Lethal Weapon 3 they decided, hey, let's make the villain more “realistic”!

Only problem is with that approach, you actually have to make him resemble a real person. The bad guy, at one point, goes into a police station to personally kill a subordinate to keep him from aiding the cops. The fact that he manages to obscure his face from all the security cameras is supposed to make him seem all smart and shit, but when Internal Affairs cop Rene Russo reveals the existence of a brand new camera from exactly the angle they need to get a good shot of him, they know exactly who he is. Anyone who managed to stay a criminal long enough to be in charge of other criminals does not do that kind of shit. Bringing up The Wire in this context is like using C-4 to open your front door, but you never saw Avon Barksdale running around inside the fucking police station shooting witnesses. You get to be in charge by not acting like a fucking retard, and the villain in Lethal Weapon 3, Jack Travis or whatever the fuck his name is, is a fucking retard. That shit at the end where he's driving the tractor toward Mel at like two miles an hour and shouting out thirty different stupid variations on exhorting Mel to confront his imminent demise, and Mel stands there and watches him slowly inch toward him before picking up a MAC-10 with armor piercing bullets and finally shutting him the fuck up . . . sorry. Try again.

Then there's the whole thing where the bad guys have street gangs as their muscle. More bullshit, and in this case a truly weird attempt to capitalize on the currency of “hood” pictures like Boyz N The Hood and South Central (Menace II Society hadn't come out yet) by being exactly like the stupid portrayals of gangs in 70s and 80s movies that the cycle of Los Angeles-based “hood” movies were a reaction against.

Danny Glover has a big freakout and crisis of conscience after he accidentally shoots a gang member his son is friends with (don't ask, it's just more bullshit) but he pulls himself together over a truly saccharine funeral scene, scored to Boyz II Men's a cappella hit “It's So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday” in some of the cheapest sentiment seen in early 90s Hollywood.

Don't fucking get me started about Joe Pesci in this movie. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam originally left him out, having some explanation about him having gone back to New York, but some dumbass exec thought people liked him, so he was written back in, utter superfluous other than to give Mel someone to make fun of. Such a waste; it's really painful watching Joe Pesci humiliate himself like this.

Surprisingly, the one thing that doesn't suck in Lethal Weapon 3 is the thing that, in a movie this stupid, should logically have been the worst offender: Mel's courtship of Internal Affairs investigator Rene Russo. First of all, with the shit Mel and Danny get up to in these movies, Internal Affairs should be up their ass. Second, Mel is enough of a dick to her that it makes her kind of sympathetic, so that when Mel is randomly over at her place and sees that she has a Three Stooges screensaver he's the one who has to stop being a dick to woo her; whenever it's the “tightass” character who has to “loosen up” the romance always seems fake. Especially since, in this case, she's doing a very valuable job: keeping cowboy assholes like Mel from violating procedure and blowing half the fuckin city up every five minutes. Also, since the two of them are totally emotionally 12 year old boys, it's both a cute romance and a plausible life partner match.

It's weird, with only one thing handled well in the entire picture—with the exception of some of the action scenes (but not all, the Joe Pesci at the hockey game one sucks wildebeest dick)—Lethal Weapon 3 ends up not being a total loss. You'll laugh, but I think that alone makes Rene Russo's one of the most underrated performance of the entire 90s. Consider she's the one thing that keeps this fucking movie from being a capital offense, and consider that this was 1992, the year of Marisa Tomei's Oscar (a clear sign that Oscar was showing the love to less-than-stellar movies), and I think you gotta talk about her as a Best Supporting contender that year. (Ed. Note: we're conveniently ignoring the fact that Angela Bassett, who wasn't nominated, should have won for Malcolm X, which should have swept every imaginable category for every award in the fucking universe that year; no, the author is not still bitter).


Lethal Weapon 4 is a huge improvement, by only being kind of stupid, though it's still a ludicrous mess and the action has long since abandoned the pretense of realism with which the first movie flirted occasionally. And Mel's Martin Riggs, by this point, had long since become more of an overgrown teenager than the legitimately crazy and dangerous motherfucker whose legit craziness in tandem with his fearsome fighting skills gave the movie its name.

The addition of Chris Rock as Danny Glover's new secret son-in-law is forced, and seems motivated more by “Hey, Chris Rock just re-invented himself as the greatest comedian in America [Ed. Note: irrefutably true circa 1998] and we can have him come in and do some shtick for a couple scenes, let's do it” rather than his character having anything more to contribute. His scene where he and Joe Pesci just stop the movie to riff to each other about cell phones for an hour, great as they both are, could easily have been cut with no problem.

Or, alternatively, replaced with more scenes of Jet Li owning motherfuckers. It should be no surprise, as a highly sophisticated cineaste with extremely refined taste, that I am a massive Jet Li fan. Evaluating his technical abilities as a martial artist is best left to people who actually know what the hell they're talking about, but I'll speak to the elegance and artistry of his moves, which make the direct and brutal moments like the one in Lethal Weapon 4 when he disassembles Mel's gun with one hand while his eyes are going “Man . . . seriously . . . go fuck yourself” all the more shocking. If anything, Jet is too good in Lethal Weapon 4; it's a stretch when Mel and Danny kill him in the end (sure, Jet's anger at his brother's death clouds his judgment, but that's a fucking lame excuse: when he's in his own movies Jet channels that anger into a mountain-leveling earthquake of kung fu, a bad guy apocalypse). To top it all off, the dude can act, too.

Jet's presence in Lethal Weapon 4, even if the movie itself wasn't a marked improvement over its immediate predecessor, would make it all okay, and he is most of what the picture has going for it. The “we all love each other” vibe of the supporting cast is hard to dislike, even if most of them don't really serve much of a purpose in the movie, and the scene when Mel, Danny, and Chris go to interrogate Triad boss Kim Chan at the dentist and accidentally all get fucked up on laughing gas (which is laced with truth serum or something, who knows) is very funny. But the story is clunky and lurches around all over the place, and poor Calvin Jung is saddled with the job of being the one token good Chinese guy who's tasked with explaining the entirety of Eastern culture to Mel and Danny. (I'm sure he was longing for the days when his only line in the picture was saying “Man, fuck you” to Robocop, at least one some level).

Really, neither Lethal Weapon 3 or 4 is much use other than giving the cast a chance to all hang out with each other again. You could do worse for a late-night cable movie than either, but the real Lethal Weapon experience is to be found in the first two movies. You know, when Martin Riggs really WAS a lethal weapon. The last two movies are profit-seeking engines powered by jokey-jokes and car chases; this would be okay in a series that didn't start out as promisingly, but is a bit of a letdown here.

However, in spite of that, it's not as though Lethal Weapons 2-4 are complete departures from the original. The elements taken by writers less talented than Shane Black and turned into the diminished quality sequels were there in the first movie. They kid around a bit, and ultimately it all comes back to family and how nice it is to have one, whether the one you're born into or the one you choose. It was subtler in the first movie, and the sequels could have correspondingly been subtle about it or taken it in different ways. But it was always there, and that's why as dumb and bad as Lethal Weapon 3 and 4 can be, they are not complete departures. They were always in the cards.

DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY!

As de rigueur as sequels (and remakes and reboots) are now, there was a time when it was not thus. I remember this because I remember it being a little weird, when Lethal Weapon was a bigass hit (grossing eight times its cost; by apples-and-oranges comparison, that's roughly the same ratio as Titanic) that it was a foregone conclusion there'd be a sequel. Sequels are a funny thing, because sure they're profit-motivated, but there are things one can do with them artistically to keep the enterprise from being purely pecuniary.

Shane Black was asked back to write the sequel. Whether as a reflection of his irritation at the first movie taking a more comic tone than he'd intended or simply an indication that his sense of the story and characers was different than that of Warner Bros executives, his script did not amuse the powers that be. In his draft, where the South African embassy in Los Angeles is using its diplomatic immunity to deal drugs and kill people (a good choice), Riggs dies in the end (not a good choice). When the studio started bringing in script doctors to “fix” things—there was also a scene where Riggs is tortured even more brutally than Al Leong did in the first one—Shane Black cut all ties with the franchise.

This is partly why the first movie stands out so. The new writers brought in—the guy who wrote Remo Williams and the guy who wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade—emphasized the comedy, expanding federal witness Leo Getz from a minor character into a fairly big supporting player (and one who, for better or worse, would be in each successive sequel), and throwing in a number of running gags (the one about Murtaugh's hot daughter appearing in a condom commercial that makes every guy in the movie, practically, say “she makes me want to buy rubbers” is excellent).

This is all okay in Lethal Weapon 2, as the villains are still very, very bad (passing all four parts of the Evil White Guys in Suits test with spectacular grades) and they do very, very bad things. And, much like the villains in the first movie, this villainy had basis in reality: when Lethal Weapon 2 came out, Nelson Mandela was still in jail for his resistance to apartheid, which, sure he had guns and a whole shitload of leftist rhetoric, but it was fucking apartheid: what was he supposed to do, not violently overthrow those shitheads? The minority white regime that ruled South Africa was perhaps the most widely vilified in the world at the time, what with Gorbachev rehabilitating the Soviet Union's rep by subtly disassembling its power structure and letting Ronald Reagan take all the credit, but they'd somehow avoided being the bad guys in too many action movies (probably because the good guys would have to be black).

That all changed in Lethal Weapon 2. Due to the history of the narcotics trade in Los Angeles, long unofficially sanctioned by the LAPD as a means of pacifying the black population, going into drugs as a wholly gratiuitous “fuck you” by the South African diplomatic presence in the city is not outside the realm of possibility (probability's a whole other matter, but still). And “not outside the realm of possibility” is a firmer grounding in realism than most action movies have, so there you go.

We pick up the action with a BANG, right in the middle of a car chase, nothing except a big loud title card that says “Lethal Weapon 2” (Ed. Note: the text, translated, means: “Yes. You are in the RIGHT FUCKING MOVIE.”) Mel and Danny have reached, in the time since the events of the first movie, a state of bickering married-coupledom: Mel's still a mild eccentric with a tendency to go hard charging into action, but out of balls rather than batshit insanity. Danny merely sighs and says “Dammit, Riggs” a lot, and occasionally unleashes a barrage of motherfuckers and sonofabitches, but such is the life of a veteran policeman.

After a highly entertaining car chase involving a helicopter right in the middle of downtown LA (the movie has the decency to have captain Steve Kahan find this weird), Mel and Danny take possession of a whole trunk full of Krugerrand. “Fuckin . . . fuckin gold,” Danny says, respectfully. The looks on his and Mel's faces when Mel kicks open the trunk of the upside down, crashed car and all the gold comes pouring out is another thing you don't get in lesser action movies: genuine surprise at something strange.

The baddies are not pleased that their gold has gone missing. Joss Ackland (left), setting the gold standard for foreign-accented villainy, is the type who will put a dropcloth on his office carpet so that he can have the pleasure of watching lead henchnazi Derrick O'Connor (right, deliberately coiffed, made up, and lit to resemble Hitler, because subtlety is for fags; to hammer the point home even more obviously, Mel nicknames him “Adolf”) shoot dudes in the face without having to leave his desk chair. This is exactly what he does to the unfortunate schmuck who was in the car with all the Krugerrand in it. Once Derrick O'Connor has carefully blown the guy's brains onto the dropcloth, Joss Ackland gives him his new assignment: intimidate Danny Glover, the lead investigator working the case of their drugs and Krugerrand, by threatening his family. Derrick O'Connor takes one look at Danny Glover's photo and goes, “Goddamn kaffir . . . lovely.” (Ed. Note: “kaffir” is how they say the n-word in South Africa). I mean . . . it is almost impossible to hate villains as much as immediately as you hate these guys after this scene. Efficient writing and some solid direction from Mr. Donner (the best descriptor for whom may be “skilled journeyman,” but remember “skilled” is the first part of that backhanded compliment).

So Derrick O'Connor and his Nazi Ninjas break into Danny Glover's house and thoroughly scare the shit out of him and piss him off. To give him a break, captain Steve Kahan (Captain Ed Murphy) puts Danny (Roger Murtaugh) and Mel (Martin Riggs) on a lower-stress gig:

Captain Ed Murphy: I got something special for you boys. A guy by the name of Getz, Leo Getz has been placed in protective custody. And you two guys are gonna babysit him until Washington sends out the feds.
Martin Riggs: How long?
Captain Ed Murphy: Soon as all the red tape is processed. Couple, three days. This guy Getz is gonna testify before a commission of inquiry. Drugs, laundered money, et cetera, et cetera. This is not a shit assignment.
[Riggs starts smoking]
Martin Riggs: Yes, it is.
Captain Ed Murphy: No, it isn’t.
Roger Murtaugh: [coughing due to Rigg's smoke] It is.
Captain Ed Murphy: It isn’t.
Roger Murtaugh: Captain, it’s a shit assignment.
Captain Ed Murphy: Shut up, the both of ya.
[Another cop comes in and hands the Captain a file.]
Captain Ed Murphy: I guaranteed this guy’s safety.
Roger Murtaugh: Why us?
Captain Ed Murphy: Because you two are the most qualified for the job. And, after last night, you could use the break.
Roger Murtaugh: I can handle last night.
Martin Riggs: What are we supposed to do with him?
Captain Ed Murphy: How the hell should I know? Take him to Disneyland.
Martin Riggs: Oh, this stinks. This stinks. This stinks!
Captain Ed Murphy: I don’t give a fuck, Riggs. That’s why I don’t have an ulcer, because I know when to say, "I don’t give a fuck." Now here’s where he’s staying. It’s a nice hotel; all the expenses are being picked up by the Justice Dept, so enjoy yourselves. :[They start to leave] And Riggs, one more thing!
Martin Riggs: [Turning back] What?
Captain Ed Murphy: [Tosses him a small 'no smoking' sign.] You know what that says?
Martin Riggs: Yeah, yeah, same thing as that. [Points to the large 'no smoking' sign next to him on the door, smirking.] But I don’t give a fuck. [Throws the small placard back and walks out.]
Roger Murtaugh: [wafting the smoke away from him]You’re lucky. I have to live with that.

That scene, which I love (Mel's line reading on that last “I don't give a fuck” is genius) is a pretty good indicator of the newer tone of this movie, at least when we're among the good guys, and establishes the template for the rest of the series: when the good guys are amongst themselves, they banter, when the bad guys are amongst themselves, they do very sinister and cruel things, and when the good guys and bad guys meet up, cars go very fast and things explode.

Danny and Mel meet Joe Pesci, whom they immediately dislike, and not without reason. Joe Pesci is, of course, mindbogglingly awesome—and goddamn, his Napoleon complex has a Napoleon complex—but the character of Leo Getz is fucking annoying. He's supposed to be an unscrupulous slimeball who never shuts up, which already puts him on the trying my patience list. Joe Pesci manages to make the character mildly endearing, especially by the end of the movie, but in the wrong mood this character is nails on a chalkboard (he's irredeemable in 3 and 4).

The South Africans send a guy to try to kill Joe Pesci and the proceedings go out the window and into the pool, at which point Joe Pesci reveals he's laundered half a billion dollars in drug money. Danny and Mel are suitably impressed.

In their pursuit of this lead—OMG THEIR CASES ARE TOTES MCGOATS RELATED!!!!11eleven!!—they find that the South Africans are running their operations out of a house on stilts (side note: if they ever get the rights issues unsnarled, it'd be nice if Thom Anderson's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself can get released, because it's fucking awesome; one of his big things in it is how movies always give bad guys these amazing modern architecture houses as villainous lairs, which really pisses him off for reasons he articulates brilliantly in the movie). Naturally, considering that the hotel guy shows up and there's a car chase, Mel and Danny bring all the other cops over there to make some arrests . . . only it turns out the baddies have diplomatic immunity, and Joss Ackland sneers that he'll be making a formal complaint with the State Department.

Not to poke holes in a movie I adore, but the diplomatic immunity issue is the flimsiest part of the story. If a bunch of diplomats were running around selling drugs and killing people and shooting at the LAPD with machine guns from a helicopter in the middle of downtown and shit . . . they'd be recalled by the South African government. They may have been racist fuckbags, but the only head of state in the history of the planet who would openly let his diplomats sell drugs and kill people is Kim Jong-il, which is why the only country that lets him have an embassy is China, because no one fucks with China. The South Africans would issue all kinds of statements decrying the deplorable behavior of their diplomats, bring them back to South Africa, and throw their asses in the prison they reserve for people they really don't like. Not out of any sudden incongruous desire to be good, but because their stupid asses got caught. As the great philosopher Harold Ramis said “Never hit anyone in anger, unless you're absolutely sure you can get away with it.” Wisdom.

As the cops leave the stilt house, grumbling, the movie introduces the proverbial Good South African, Patsy Kensit's lovely consulate employee Rika van den Haas. Rika is a fairly unique character by the undemanding standards of action movie love interests, in that she embodies two disparate types at once by being the proverbial Good Girl while still being simply walking sex. The latter may have something to do with her being Patsy Kensit but I kind of doubt it, considering she's been icily distant in everything else I've ever seen her in (including interviews, and that infamous Cool Britannia magazine cover she did with then-consort Liam Fookin Gallagher). Whatever the case, Patsy Kensit shows up and widower Mel gets the thunderbolt.

Since they can't directly approach the baddies due to the whole diplomatic immunity thing, Mel, Danny, and Pesci (even though he's a witness they're supposed to be protecting, they still take him around to all the action movie shit they do, which is kind of funny because he's so annoying they're probably half-hoping he gets killed) concoct a plan to get Mel into Joss Ackland's office at the consulate (the same place he has Derrick O'Connor kill people). It's a wonderful comic vignette, where Danny pretends to want to emigrate to South Africa, but the consul employee they talk to (who aside from being a tightass seems like a nice enough guy) tells him, “You don't want to go to South Africa,” and Danny goes “Why?” and he says (in one of the movie's finest moments) “Be-because you're bleck!” This gives Danny an excuse to get all militant, and in the ensuing uproar—utilizing the already in-progress anti-apartheid demonstration outside the consulate as cover—Mel sneaks into Joss Ackland's office and, when the baddies return, basically whips his dick out and tells them “Diplomatic immunity or no, your motherfuckin ass is grass.”

This turns out to be a major mistake, as the bad guys proceed to kill just about every single other cop in LA who isn't Mel, Danny, or Steve Kahan (including the sacriligeous-for-the-80s assassinations of such luminaries as Dean Norris and Jenette Goldstein; what sick son of a bitch kills Jenette Goldstein? They don't call em Evil White Guys in Suits for no fuckin reason, believe you me). Mel escapes the ire of the Sudafrikans by fucking Patsy Kensit in his trailer, while Danny is off babysitting Joe Pesci. Still, Danny gets ambushed in his home, Joe Pesci gets kidnapped by the baddies, Danny only survives by nail-gunning a couple guys in the throat, and there's a massive machine guns and helicopters action scene where Mel and Patsy and Mel's dog escape narrowly only to be bushwacked by Derrick O'Connor at her place.

Derrick O'Connor, it transpires, is the very guy who killed Mel's wife, as the very same shadowy drug dealer to whom Mel was getting too close way back when. THE PLOT THICKENS! To make matters worse, he's killed Patsy Kensit, so Mel flips his shit as only Mel can flip his shit, driving his pickup truck out to the stilt house with the objective of ripping it from its moorings and bringing it crashing down in a flaming, racist-immolating wreck. (Again, not to be a dick, and I know it's Mel we're talkin about here, but if any pissed-off borderline psycho in a pickup truck could throw a chain around one of the stilts and just pull the fuckin thing down, don'tcha think they wouldn't build houses on stilts? I mean, come on, the fucker would have to pass earthquake code, right? It is Los Angeles, after all . . .)

With the stilt house gone to the great drafting table in the sky (and Joe Pesci rescued), Danny informs Mel that he's figured out where the Evil White Guys are, so they go roll into battle to kick some ass. Mel's boss fight against Derrick O'Connor is pretty tremendous shit, as Mel's rage and encyclopedic arsenal of esoteric martial arts match up extremely well against Derrick O'Connor's weird Dancing Marquis of Queensbury Capoeira Master style. Mel polishes him off in highly satisfying fashion, only to have Joss Ackland light him the fuggup with a Mauser (they don't stop with the Nazi parallels) at ridiculous range. Danny arrives in just the nick of time for one of the great stupid action movie moments of all time:

Joss Ackland (tauntingly, holding up his ID): Diplomatic immunity!
(Danny Glover puts one between his eyes)
Danny Glover: It's just been revoked!

FUCK YEAH, DANNY GLOVER! Way to start an international incident that would result in George Bush cravenly apologizing to de Klerk in such a manner that would strengthen domestic reactionary resolve within South Africa to such a degree that apartheid would last for an additional decade or more, perhaps even becoming the North Korea of Africa (a truly harrowing thought when you consider how fucked up most of Africa was and still is). I mean, maybe. There's a chance that if the Americans managed to throw a quick net over the whole situation and fake a tragic accident or something that it might be okay. For everyone except Danny Glover, of course. His ass would disappear. You know, if the movie really gave a fuck. Instead they just let Danny stay with the gravely injured Mel and share some male-bonding yuks while they wait for the fuzz to arrive.

Although it's the Lethal Weapon movie I've rewatched most often and, subjectively, it's my favorite I still have to admit Lethal Weapon 2 is a lesser movie when compared with the first. The jokey-jokes are a bit much at times—though nowhere near as bad as they were the rest of the series, and the exploding toilet's good for a yuk, though god damn that bomb blanket was strong, to keep Danny and Mel from blowing up when they were literally right next to a bomb that blew up the whole top of Danny's house—and unlike the first movie's relatively scant “get the fuck outta here” moments, about every five minutes something utterly recockulous happens (like the aforementioned toilet, not to mention the South African accents are on some Dick Van Dyke shit in terms of broad caricature). As such, this is the picture that stylistically, tonally, and in nearly every other way, is what people usually think of when they think of Lethal Weapon. The first movie would remain a kind of outlier, as an action movie with comedy: the remainder of the series would mainly be comedies where lots of shit blew up and two or three interpolations of Great Seriousness.

Still, let's have no misunderstanding. Lethal Weapon 2 is awesome. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and holy fucking shit Patsy Kensit in those suits. Yow. She makes me want to go out and buy rubbers.

Up next: Lethal Weapons 3 & 4!

I SUPPOSE WE'LL HAVE TO REGISTER YOU AS A LETHAL WEAPON

Charting the supernarrative of a movie franchise is often kind of like watching a game of telephone played by a lot of rich people on cocaine. Invariably, after three or so sequels, the thing that started everything off—the first movie—is forgotten, and the franchise itself becomes an entity, rather than its individual parts mattering all that much. And by the last movie in the series, any resemblance to the original installment is cosmetic as best.

The Lethal Weapon series, weirdly, is not one of these cases. The evolution of the Lethal Weapon series into the cute & cuddly “we all love working on these movies and each other” denouement of the fourth movie, where the theme of family saw its conclusion as the characters' families of blood and choice paralleled the sense of the actors and crew being one big family, is mirrored within the first movie, when you look at it closely, and in the first movie's development from first draft to wrapped picture.

Starting as a very dark spec script by recent UCLA graduate Shane Black in the mid-80s, Lethal Weapon was written as a calling card in the “high concept” fashion that had come into fashion that decade. The high concept, originally, was roughly along the lines of “what if Travis Bickle was a cop [instead of a taxi driver]?” Protagonist, Vietnam vet narcotics cop Martin Riggs, is a deeply fucked up individual with no concern for his life in these early drafts, and is a genuinely dangerous entity on the LAPD.

In contrast to the assumed, faceless executive sending a memo with some asinine note like “can we make it funnier?” the way Lethal Weapon became a buddy action/comedy instead of Taxi Driver-on-the-LAPD was not a decision but an accident of casting. Casting director Marion Dougherty went like, “all right, I need a really crazy motherfucker . . . well, that's Mel Gibson.” Done and done.

That part makes perfect sense, since we all know Mel Gibson's crazy. The truly inspired choice Dougherty made was Danny Glover. In the original script, Murtaugh's race isn't specified, which generally means laziness and (to be generous, maybe unintentional) racism dictate “white guy.” Aside from the unusually progressive “hey, how about this guy” thought, the fact that she came up with this idea watching Danny Glover play the worst person in the universe in The Color Purple is a sign Marion Dougherty was damn good at her job. When Mel Gibson and Danny Glover got in the room with director Richard Donner, they clicked immediately and it was set.

It was the powerful chemistry between the two actors that steered the movie in a lighter direction, as their natural dynamic lent itself to banter and ball-busting. Without all that many major structural changes, Shane Black's pitch-dark cop nightmare movie about one guy became the definitive buddy cop movie. The moral of the story: never underrate the importance of casting in movies.

It was thus that Lethal Weapon as we know it came to be. Shane Black would later complain (with good cause in some cases) about his work being polluted by the studio development process, and by notes from studio executives motivated more by profit than art. In Lethal Weapon's case, though, a certain degree of lightness arguably helped the picture.



The parade of imitators that followed makes it easy to forget, almost a quarter-century after its release, how massive Lethal Weapon was upon its initial release. There had been buddy pictures (of which 48 Hrs must be considered the standard bearer), and there had certainly been action pictures (one love, Arnold), and there had even been action/comedies (Beverly Hills Cop, of course), but Lethal Weapon was the first picture to merge all of these elements together to create a gleaming alloy of fucking badass.

What sets the first picture apart from the rest of the series is that Lethal Weapon, despite having some funny bits, is most assuredly an action picture first, second, and third, and maybe a comedy fourth, or fifth. There is some seriously fucked-up shit in Lethal Weapon. The whole thing about the cop hero being a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules became first a cliché and then word salad after a couple decades of le cinema de let's-fucking-blow-shit-up, but Martin Riggs (Mel) is 12 kilometers out of his fucking mind (Ed. Note: you need the metric system to measure the shit; dude is out there). The theatrical cut introduces Mel in a lot full of Christmas trees (a nice touch in LA, as is the fact that the scene is shot with magic hour Pacific sunshine) trying to buy some cocaine off a bunch of knuckleheads.

Drug Dealer #3: [Riggs is in a Christmas tree lot, and pretends to sample some coke for a buy] Good, huh? Tasty? Smooth?
Martin Riggs: Yeah, that's good...
Drug Dealer #1: [walking up with a beer] Here ya go, pal...
Martin Riggs: Thanks. Okay, so let's do it. How much?
Drug Dealer #3: How much for how much?
Martin Riggs: For all of it.
Drug Dealer #3: You want it all. He wants it all.
Drug Dealer #1: He wants it all, beautiful. Congratulations!
Drug Dealer #3: All right!
Martin Riggs: Maybe a nice six footer to put it under, huh?
Drug Dealer #2: You want a tree? I'll tell you what. I'll give you the best tree I got on the lot, for nothin'. But the shit's gonna cost ya... a hundred.
Martin Riggs: What, that much?
Drug Dealer #3: Hey, you said you liked it, that's a fair price.
Martin Riggs: Yeah... yeah! Hell, you only live once... get this together here...
[takes out his wallet, starts counting out a hundred dollars]
Martin Riggs: Twenty, forty, sixty, seventy...
Drug Dealer #1: Hey, what the fuck...
Drug Dealer #2: Hey, man... Hey!
Martin Riggs: C'mon, shut up man, I'm losin' count... Ninety-three, ninety-four, ninety...
Drug Dealer #2: Forget it, you dumbshit. One hundred THOUSAND. One hundred THOUSAND, DOLLARS!
Martin Riggs: A hundred thousand?
[laughs]
Martin Riggs: I'm sorry, I can't afford that, not on my salary. But I'll tell ya what, I got a better idea, here. Let me say I take the whole stash of your hands for free, and you assholes can go to jail.
[takes out his badge and puts it on the table in front of them]
Martin Riggs: What do you say about that? Now I could read you guys your rights, but ah, you guys already know what your rights are, don't you?
Drug Dealer #2: [drug dealers stare, then start to laugh] This badge ain't real. YOU ain't real.
Drug Dealer #1: No, but you sure are a crazy son of a bitch!
Martin Riggs: [They all laugh] You think I'm crazy? You call me crazy, you think I'm crazy? You wanna see crazy?
[Riggs starts slapping him self on the head, Stooges style, then pokes their eyes and slaps them, and pulls out his gun]
Martin Riggs: . Now that's a real badge, I'm a real cop, and this is a real fucking gun!
Drug Dealer #2: [menacing] Okay, pal...
Martin Riggs: Hey, noses in the dirt, asshole...
[And the guns start blazin']

(Ed. Note: all asides courtesy of imdb)

Mel, that whole scene, right up until he pulls his heat, has this cracked, alien, child-like vibe. The dialogue itself is pretty standard tough-guy stuff, but his delivery is straight up Martian. It's a little disconcerting, as is the fact that in the ensuing fracas, he lights up two or three of the bad guys without blinking and is about to blow the last one's brains out at point blank range, and a very nervous SWAT guy has to try and calm Mel down with a “it ain't worth it, man.” It's an intense scene, and conveys Mel's insanity as a very real, vivid thing. There was an earlier scene in the extended director's cut (which doesn't really serve any purpose other than making the first act twice as long) where Mel walks straight into a situation where a sniper is holding some kids hostage, and just walks slowly with the thousand yard stare in his eyes and just fucking ices the sniper. It's a great scene, regrettably superfluous, but it firmly establishes Mel as so fucking crazy he's barely in control, if he even is.

Danny Glover and the rest of the Murtaugh family, by contrast, are the model of the stable, healthy, American nuclear family. He's turning 50, his wife's a shitty cook, his kids are wiseasses and his (drop dead gorgeous) daughter is starting to date. Total square-ass, good cop. The story is set in motion when the daughter of Danny Glover's old Vietnam buddy (Tom Atkins) jumps naked off a high-rise balcony with a bloodstream full of drain cleaner-laced drugs. His grumpy captain (Steve Kahan; minor aside, I always wondered why Steve Kahan wasn't the grumpy captain in everything, because he's fucking awesome, but it turns out he's Richard Donner's cousin so he mostly only acts when cousin Rich calls him up and says “what up cuz, I need a middle-aged/old white guy to be awesome, you free?” and he goes “Sure!”) decides he needs a partner. Danny Glover, upon seeing Mel, immediately goes “bad guy” and when Mel gets out his gun to check the action or something, he goes “GUN!” and ultimately gets judo'd to the floor by Mel. “Meet your new partner,” says random other cop Grand L. Bush with a smirk.

Unlike most other random mismatched buddy pairings, which actually are random due to the movies being shitty, the contrast between Danny and Mel has relevant implications for the story. One is the thing that most buddy movies that bother to give a fuck about character development do, where each character helps the other. In Lethal Weapon's case that means Mel's fly by the seat of his ass wildman approach helps Danny Glover loosen up slightly and embrace his inner badass, and Mel manages to conquer his crippling isolation and suicidal depression over the death of his wife and rejoin the human race. Neither involves the kind of cartoonish transformation that one sees in lesser pictures, as both are plausibly enough drawn that the reciprocity makes them a good team rather than two completely different people.

The other major one is the Vietnam connection. Both of them are vets, but Danny Glover was in the early, “military advisors,” Gulf of Tonkin era of the war, and Mel was deep in the shit in the post-Tet, My Lai, Walter Cronkite openly going on TV and calling the war unwinnable part. This common ground gives them a grounds for mutual respect (leading to eventual harmonious partnership), and also ties in nicely with the villain's drug conspiracy.

This is another thing that sets Lethal Weapon apart: the shit its bad guys get up to is something that actually happened. One of the darker (and poorly kept) secrets of the Vietnam War was the drug business the CIA was doing it Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was highly profitable, and largely responsible, due to enterprising servicemen like Frank (American Gangster) Lucas, for the greater availability of illegal drugs in the United States from the 70s on. Now, a certain amount of poetic license was taken in the movie; the CIA does not fly around in helicopters on American soil and silence their bankers by machine gunning them through the window of their oceanside mansions. But Gary Busey's trick of holding his forearm over a lit cigarette lighter without flinching is straight up G. Gordon Liddy, for more historical relevance.

Of course, for all this talk of verisimilitude, Lethal Weapon is still an action movie, not a documentary. Mel is a supernatural shot with a pistol: the scene where he and Danny are yakking about this hooker who might have hotshot and/or pushed the naked suicidal daughter out the window on the shooting range, and Mel shoots a smiley face onto his target from like a gajillion yards out . . . it's awesome, and it's a great sight gag, but it is bullshit. Danny Glover gets all sadface about the fact that he can only hit dead center of the target off a quick draw, which is actually about as awesome a pistol shot as one can be in real life. But, like I said, it's an action movie. The verisimilitude is there to make it easier for us to suspend our disbelief. Which is as it should be.

Lethal Weapon is a little rough around the edges in terms of execution, something that helps emphasize its real-ishness. Danny Glover's performance is really kind of wonderful; his flat line readings used to bug me occasionally way back when, but repeated viewings (and oh how repeated those viewings have been) have led me to consider the awkwardness of some of his delivery as an aspect of his regular guy square-ass character. That guy is not smooth. If, for some bizarre reason, he calls Mel “you crazy son of a . . . [5 second pause] . . . bitch!” (I'm not exactly sure whether that was from the first one or one of the sequels, but that doesn't matter) it's not shitty acting. He's playing a guy who would say random shit really awkwardly.

And then there's Mel. Everyone is legitimately a little scared of Mel, as they should be, because he's nucking futs. That bit where he talks the jumper out of jumping off the building—which, by the way, is one of Lethal Weapon's departures from versimilitude—and then handcuffs the guy and jumps off the roof with him, to land in the gigantic airbag . . . well, okay. Let's back up. That scene is really fucking stupid, and I say that as an avowed lover of Lethal Weapon. First, if the cops had inflated a gigantic airbag right underneath where the dude was jumping, what does it matter if he jumps? Forget whether those things work in real life, whether you'd actually break a leg if you jumped on one or your neck if you got the angle wrong (shit, bulletproof vests stop everything short of a tactical nuke in movies). Clearly, in movie world, they work, because Mel jumps him into it and neither of them so much as have a hair out of place. So why does Danny Glover get all bent out of shape about Mel being suicidal, based on that? Mel has one of his better points in the whole movie: “You wanted him down, he's down.” Sure, it's an example of reckless behavior, from which I'm sure Danny Glover extrapolated and got the suicide thing (also, we did see Mel think about eating his gun in that one fucked up amazingly well-done scene earlier). And it leads to Mel's great speech about the job being the only thing that keeps him from checking out. So yeah, whatever, nevermind, the denouement to the jumper scene is great, but the scene itself reeked more of “we need something suspenseful here because it's the x minute mark” rather than it being legitimately necessary.

Once Mel and Danny go up against Gary Busey and the Special Forces All-Stars (led by asshole general Mitchell Ryan in a fucking rock solid Evil White Guy performance that he managed to pull off without even wearing a Suit . . . even though you know damn well he's got some really really conservative ones in his closet back home) shit gets real. The showdown in the desert is awesome. Mel has taken a shotgun blast in the chest and is presumed, by the evil white guys, to be dead (that one cop who sort of looks like John Spencer's tenor cousin abets the lie nicely) because he would be if he wasn't wearing one of those Shroud Of Turin ass motherfucking vests that can stop Zeus that dudes wear in movies. And the evil white guys have kidnapped Danny Glover's hot daughter just because they're evil (and stupid; any real drug dealers with CIA/Special Forces connections worth a shit would have just killed his entire family, not to mention they'd have gone for and 10-ringed a headshot on Mel) , so Mel decides to hide in the brush with a scope rifle (a real nice one too; he must have requisitioned it from the LAPD's special Action Movie Armory that they must have considering some of the weaponry movie fuzz gets to use). Here's my favorite part: when it's showtime, Mel manages to kill the bad guys in a manner so badass it has authorial style, leading Gary Busey to go “Damn it, it's Riggs.”

Okay. The idea that you can have a recognizable style in the way you kill dudes is frankly something that pleases me. I find it highly enjoyable. Second, that Riggs (Mel; I know I skip between character and actor names, bear with me, I get excitable) has a style so distinct that even though he's supposed to be fucking dead, Gary Busey recognizes from two gunshots not that it's some random other LAPD sharpshooter, or even Danny Glover's crazy-as-a-shithouse rat other Vietnam buddy (played, hypothetically and with leathery, reptilian swagger by a cynical, wisecracking Lance Fucking Henriksen) who has a flair for long-range hits. No, he recognizes it immediately as Mel. This is why action movies are sacred to me.

And, after all the bad guys are done being killed (including the immortal Al Leong in one of his exasperatingly few speaking roles), we end on a note of familial harmony, Danny inviting Mel in for Christmas dinner with the family, and Mel inviting his dog (with whom he lives in a trailer on the beach for reasons more cinematographic than practical) in, and the dog immediately getting in a fight with the cat. A fight, please note, that perfectly mirrors the initial conflict between Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. And, also note, this coming together prefigures the direction the rest of the series would take, and the ultimate resolution of the fourth movie. But we're not there yet, and we're running a little long, we'll pick things up with a discussion of Lethal Weapon 2 next time!