Lethal Weapon (1987)
Rated R
Score: 4 out of 5
The other great '80s action movie set around Christmas, Lethal Weapon is, together with 48 Hrs., the reason why the phrase "buddy cop movie" exists. (Roger Ebert called them "wunza movies", because the plot description always began with "one's a...".) Shane Black's script wasn't the first story about two mismatched police officers forced to team up to take down a bad guy while working through their own differences, but thanks to both his wit and Richard Donner's direction, it's the movie that every one since has tried to live up to. The dialogue is salty and witty, the action is deployed surprisingly sparingly but is effective when it hits, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are perfectly cast, it does a great job pulling the viewer into its heightened world of ordinary cops up against '80s excess, and the nature of its villains is surprisingly subversive given the time in which this came out. Some parts of it have aged better than others, but even so, this is just a really good movie to throw on, groove to, and laugh with.
We start out in a manner that lets you know exactly what year this movie was made. On a December night, a half-naked blonde woman named Amanda Hunsaker snorts a rail of cocaine before jumping out the window of her high-rise hotel room. Two cops are on the case: Roger Murtaugh, a straight-laced family man, and Martin Riggs, a rabid, self-destructive loose cannon with a death wish. They get along just great. Murtaugh took the case because he was friends with Amanda's father Michael Hunsaker, who saved his life in Vietnam and believes that his daughter was murdered by someone trying to send him a message -- and when the autopsy reveals that she had been poisoned with drain cleaner, suddenly things start to look like homicide. What starts out as a murder investigation soon spirals into a criminal conspiracy going all the way to the military and the Vietnam War, as Riggs and Murtaugh find themselves facing much bigger fish than they ever thought they'd encounter.
The villains here are based on real-life stories about CIA involvement in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and Latin America, with most historians agreeing that, even if they never directly handled the drugs, they were complicit in turning a blind eye to it and supporting "freedom fighters" who raised money by creating and moving large quantities of illegal product. For a cops vs. robbers movie made during the height of the War on Crime, this was a surprisingly bold move, and one that I've noticed seems to track well with the distrust of powerful military, intelligence, and business institutions that Shane Black's shown in his other scripts (especially The Long Kiss Goodnight), taking a Reagan-era ethos and turning it back around against "the heroes" in a manner that I'd imagine must have played quite well at a time when the Iran-Contra scandal dominated the headlines.
I bring this up not just because I think it's interesting, but also because I think it's the secret to why this movie works so well and still holds up in a time when police brutality is a hot-button issue: even as it glamorizes the police, it doesn't glamorize "tough on crime" rhetoric, pinning the blame for the crime wave of the '80s not on "street scum" or foreign cartels but on the powerful people who profited from the drug epidemic and let it get out of control. (A message that still resonates all too well in the wake of the opioid epidemic.) It is willing to grapple, even if only in brief moments, with the distrust of the police that many non-white communities have, as Riggs and Murtaugh have to follow a lead in a mostly black neighborhood where the local kids' only interaction with the cops is seeing them shoot black people. Murtaugh especially is the kind of person that people often imagine a cop should be, somebody who resolves disputes peacefully when he can, and while Riggs is an extremely flawed human being and police officer, the film recognizes his problems for what they are, signs of a deeply maladjusted human being. In hindsight, Mel Gibson's personal controversies and scandals over the years made him an even more perfect fit to play Martin Riggs than he must have seemed in 1987, a guy who may be a badass former Green Beret but is also extremely messed up now. He is suicidal over the death of his wife, he lives in a trailer, nobody on the force wants to be partnered with him due to how he puts his fellow officers' lives in danger, and the reason for his ridiculous, braggadocious "cowboy" antics is because he has a legitimate death wish and does not care if he gets gunned down in the line of duty. He is the perfect distillation of Gibson's public persona, warts and all, and while we are supposed to root for him to succeed, we're also supposed to root for him to realize that there's a better way than the self-destructive course he's on. Danny Glover's Murtaugh has no time for his bullshit; the first utterance of his iconic catch phrase "I'm too old for this shit" comes when he's first partnered up with Riggs, who had thrown him to the ground after he saw Riggs mishandling his sidearm in the waiting room and mistook him for an armed perp. For much of the movie, Murtaugh and Riggs feel like they truly hate each other, not just bickering like old buddies like in countless lesser buddy cop flicks. Them learning to respect one another, both learning from the other to become better people, felt real.
The action here is intense and stylish, and even if I have been spoiled by the likes of John Wick and The Raid, I can still tell exciting action scenes when I see them. The pace of the film isn't breakneck, but it does instill in the viewer the sense that the main characters could die or get seriously injured at any moment, even outside an obvious action scene; one of Shane Black's trademarks as a writer, which this film delivers probably the greatest example of, is that each of his films has a scene that uses a massive explosion the way a horror screenwriter might use a jump scare. The shootouts, car chases, and fistfights were brutal, knock-down, drag-out affairs in which Riggs and Murtaugh use everything at their disposal, and as often as not, the scenes offer them as much development as their dialogue does; witness Riggs stroll into the middle of a school shooting to confront the gunman, letting everyone know that he just does not give a fuck, or Murtaugh threaten to kill an entire crowd of bad guys, plus himself, with a grenade as the by-the-book cop finally throws the book to the side and goes ballistic. And of course, the score by Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton always lends some added punch, whether it's that sexy sax during slower and more dramatic moments or Kamen's trademark strings during pulse-pounding action scenes.
The villains here are based on real-life stories about CIA involvement in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and Latin America, with most historians agreeing that, even if they never directly handled the drugs, they were complicit in turning a blind eye to it and supporting "freedom fighters" who raised money by creating and moving large quantities of illegal product. For a cops vs. robbers movie made during the height of the War on Crime, this was a surprisingly bold move, and one that I've noticed seems to track well with the distrust of powerful military, intelligence, and business institutions that Shane Black's shown in his other scripts (especially The Long Kiss Goodnight), taking a Reagan-era ethos and turning it back around against "the heroes" in a manner that I'd imagine must have played quite well at a time when the Iran-Contra scandal dominated the headlines.
I bring this up not just because I think it's interesting, but also because I think it's the secret to why this movie works so well and still holds up in a time when police brutality is a hot-button issue: even as it glamorizes the police, it doesn't glamorize "tough on crime" rhetoric, pinning the blame for the crime wave of the '80s not on "street scum" or foreign cartels but on the powerful people who profited from the drug epidemic and let it get out of control. (A message that still resonates all too well in the wake of the opioid epidemic.) It is willing to grapple, even if only in brief moments, with the distrust of the police that many non-white communities have, as Riggs and Murtaugh have to follow a lead in a mostly black neighborhood where the local kids' only interaction with the cops is seeing them shoot black people. Murtaugh especially is the kind of person that people often imagine a cop should be, somebody who resolves disputes peacefully when he can, and while Riggs is an extremely flawed human being and police officer, the film recognizes his problems for what they are, signs of a deeply maladjusted human being. In hindsight, Mel Gibson's personal controversies and scandals over the years made him an even more perfect fit to play Martin Riggs than he must have seemed in 1987, a guy who may be a badass former Green Beret but is also extremely messed up now. He is suicidal over the death of his wife, he lives in a trailer, nobody on the force wants to be partnered with him due to how he puts his fellow officers' lives in danger, and the reason for his ridiculous, braggadocious "cowboy" antics is because he has a legitimate death wish and does not care if he gets gunned down in the line of duty. He is the perfect distillation of Gibson's public persona, warts and all, and while we are supposed to root for him to succeed, we're also supposed to root for him to realize that there's a better way than the self-destructive course he's on. Danny Glover's Murtaugh has no time for his bullshit; the first utterance of his iconic catch phrase "I'm too old for this shit" comes when he's first partnered up with Riggs, who had thrown him to the ground after he saw Riggs mishandling his sidearm in the waiting room and mistook him for an armed perp. For much of the movie, Murtaugh and Riggs feel like they truly hate each other, not just bickering like old buddies like in countless lesser buddy cop flicks. Them learning to respect one another, both learning from the other to become better people, felt real.
The action here is intense and stylish, and even if I have been spoiled by the likes of John Wick and The Raid, I can still tell exciting action scenes when I see them. The pace of the film isn't breakneck, but it does instill in the viewer the sense that the main characters could die or get seriously injured at any moment, even outside an obvious action scene; one of Shane Black's trademarks as a writer, which this film delivers probably the greatest example of, is that each of his films has a scene that uses a massive explosion the way a horror screenwriter might use a jump scare. The shootouts, car chases, and fistfights were brutal, knock-down, drag-out affairs in which Riggs and Murtaugh use everything at their disposal, and as often as not, the scenes offer them as much development as their dialogue does; witness Riggs stroll into the middle of a school shooting to confront the gunman, letting everyone know that he just does not give a fuck, or Murtaugh threaten to kill an entire crowd of bad guys, plus himself, with a grenade as the by-the-book cop finally throws the book to the side and goes ballistic. And of course, the score by Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton always lends some added punch, whether it's that sexy sax during slower and more dramatic moments or Kamen's trademark strings during pulse-pounding action scenes.
The Bottom Line
Lethal Weapon is not merely a pioneer, it still mostly holds up even as action movies since have only gotten bigger and badder. It's highly watchable and viscerally entertaining from start to finish, and I can see why so many have tried to imitate its alchemy.
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