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!
