Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo.

Have I Seen It Before: I had to have at some point.

That probably tells you a little bit. Do we even need a review at this point. Well, we’ve come all this way. Might as well.

Did I Like It: You know what this movie reminds me of? The fourth season of Arrested Development. Everyone is here, there are even some new high-profile people to try and awkwardly fit into the mix, but it never seems like everybody had the same availability. Joe Pesci flits through the film that I seriously wondered if the twist at the end was that Leo Getz had been dead the entire time.

Alas, no.

What’s left is a movie that is all incident, and only occasionally interested in some kind of a story. That might be a fair criticism of the series as a whole, so maybe Lethal Weapon 4 is the inevitable culmination of everything that came before.

Which brings me to the inevitable, and perhaps unanswerable question: Should this be the end? Should any of us—to say nothing of the cast—be subjected to the long-threatened Lethal Finale?

Riggs (Gibson) and Murtaugh (Glover) are playing things in this like aging is right on top of them*, can we even imagine them putting off retirement all the way into Gavin Newsom’s California? Would they be bickering pensioners brought into some case against their will and have to bicker along with a newer, gentler LAPD?

Or, worse yet, would some Syd Field three-acter try to steal the structure of The Godfather - Part II (1974) and we’d have to sit through alternating flashbacks, complete with CGI Gibson and Glover?

Better question: With the death of Richard Donner, are we really interested in Mel Gibson having the opportunity to have what might be a mainstream redemption?

Alas, no. Let’s leave it at this, shall we?

*Don’t make me write down the line.

Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. The gulf between my review of Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and this film is a little odd, as I started re-watching this one immediately thereafter, drifted somewhere in the middle of the hockey game sequence, and then five years passed before I came back to it.

Did I Like It: That probably tells you something. There’s at least some degree of difficulty finding Gibson charming when he isn’t trying to be feral. Naturally, someone like Mad Max is never going to be anything other than feral, but eventually now that Riggs has found some place to belong in the world and gotten as much revenge for the death of his wife as he’s likely ever going to get, what is left for the character to do? Domesticate himself? That’s never going to seem like anything less than genuine, and the whole film suffers for it.

Relying on Glover or Pesci to pick up the slack doesn’t seem like much of a recipe for a three-quel. Glover is doing the same schtick he’s been doing for three films now, and he’s a much better actor that the series was ever able to challenge him to display. Pesci provided the most annoying parts of the previous film, and I’ve got a couple of comments about whatever marketing report insisted he receive third billing behind Glover and Gibson. The buddy cup duo is a well-worn formula. The buddy cop and their friend building a trio was an awkward enough phrase to type for this review, to say nothing of trying to jam it into a poster or Syd Field’s three-act structure.

And this thing came out like a week and a half after the Rodney King riots. How could it possibly have played as anything other than tone-deaf, even in that magical, far away land of “another time.” Even the cartoonish treatment of Apartheid in 2 felt like something of a moral stance, not just random highlighting of stories from the Los Angeles Times.

No wonder Jeffrey Boam got credited three times for writing the film*. It’s a disjointed mess, and the film can’t even decide who’s responsible.

*Yes, I know how the credits got like that. There still has to be a point when the WGA decides what their rules dictate are just going to make them look like idiots.

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Joss Ackland

Have I Seen it Before: Again, sure.

Did I Like It: I almost want to take back my retroactive ambivalence about <Lethal Weapon (1987)>. There were instances—indeed, long stretches—where I was less distracted by how awful Mel Gibson has proven himself to be.

My immediate instinct is to to say that there’s so much Three Stooges shtick jammed into the film that I can’t help but be annoyed at the movie for an entirely different set of Gibson’s predilections… But that doesn’t cover it: I actually found myself liking the film.

Part of that is that this feels like a more personal story for Riggs, if not necessarily Murtaugh (Glover). The previously unseen unravelling of his life now fuels part of the plot. While the whole “I’m the villain and the cause of all your problems” has been done to death here (and, indeed, is a reprise in the great summer of 1989 after Batman (1989) pulled the same trick), it does give some narrative fuel to Riggs’ Riggsiness, whereas in the last film it just felt like a randomly selected character trait to serve his mismatched pairing with Murtaugh.

Also, the conceit behind the film is somewhat ingenious in its simplicity. What is an Action Movie Cop (tm) to do when the evil crime lords also have diplomatic immunity. Granted, it could have easily been a plot in a Robocop film, would have been right at home creating issues for John McClane in a Die Hard sequel, or even any number of Schwarzenegger or Stallone characters. But Riggs and Murtaugh got there first, so they get the points… If points were something we were keeping track of in 1980s action films.

Lethal Weapon (1987)

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Mitchell Ryan, Gary Busey

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Let’s reckon with a strange question before I get into any qualities of the movie. Why is there so much sturm und drang as to whether or not Die Hard (1988) is a Christmas movie (it, is by the way, but that’s a discussion for another review), when this movie gets hardly a peep?

I wonder if it is mostly that by the time that these silly movie debates held on the internet became a thing, Mel Gibson as one of the all-time leading men had firmly become a thing of the past.

And that’s the thing I’m most struck by here. We’re supposed to like Mel Gibson. Feel sorry for him. Even with this being the ur of the modern buddy action movie, it’s hard to separate Mel Gibson the man from Martin Riggs the character. All of that manic energy will soon be harnessed into something pretty ugly. Makes it difficult to have a good time, and isn’t that the point of a movie like Lethal Weapon?

I was struck recently by reading that Richard Donner’s first choice for Riggs was his Superman (1978) discovery, Christopher Reeve. I have a hard time imagining that, as even when Reeve played slightly unhinged and despicable, he had a gentleness that couldn’t fully be erased. That he went ahead and made Superman IV - The Quest for Peace (1987) was probably the wrong move for him, but I probably would have been able to more fully dwell on the action, the chemistry between Riggs and Murtaugh, and Donner’s direction.

Now, it all feels a bit too weird for words. No one knows the fate of the long-threatened Lethal Finale now that Donner has passed on, but I can’t help but imagine that one being really weird.