Director: Richard Donner
Starring: Danny Glover,Mel Gibson,Gary Busey,Mitch Ryan
Okay, usually you’d think that when they make three sequels to an original movie, the original must have been pretty good. Just look at the Star Wars and Alien movies, which took a great first movie and made three more spin-offs of it. So having seen only the mediocre third installment of the Lethal Weapon series, I figured that the first one would be some hilarious action-comedy like it said on the back of the video case, but I was completely disappointed by this flat and uncreative movie.
The story follows detectives Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Riggs (Mel Gibson) as they investigate further into the apparent suicide of the daughter of one of Murtaugh’s old friends. Soon it becomes obvious that the girl was in fact murdered, and that a secret drug ring is behind the whole operation. Naturally the bad guys don’t want the detectives telling anyone about their shady dealings, so they start hunting Murtaugh and Riggs, guided by the ruthless and mysterious Mr. Joshua (Gary Busey). The final scene, a hand-to-hand battle between Riggs and Mr. Joshua, is probably the movie’s best, which isn’t saying much.
Basically, this movie tries to be both an action flick and a comedy, and it fails on both fronts. I think there were like 5 jokes in the entire movie, all consisting of Danny Glover muttering, “I’m too old for this s**t.” I think Riggs’s suicidal tendencies were supposed to be funny, but making a joke out of someone who carries a specially tipped bullet in order to kill himself correctly is not really my idea of comedy.
As for the action, it was flat and totally cliched. I hate it in movies when 10 guys with machine guns can’t take out two guys with revolving pistols, and that’s what happened in basically every scene in this movie. There’s also the classic ‘80’s movie mistakes, like those awfully shot chase scenes, where we go from the driver to an aerial shot—now the car makes a great turn while we can’t see the stuntman—and then back again. Wow, very subtle camerawork. Then there’s the main bad guy, Mr. Joshua, who was supposed to be intimidating, but instead of being scared by him, I actually started laughing in his first scene, when another man puts a lighter under Mr. Joshua’s arm to show how tough he is…oooh, scary. (Correction: make that 6 laughs for the whole movie).
Bad action, bad comedy, and not a single plot twist…not much to work with here. Leave it on the shelf at the video store, and let someone else make the mistake of renting this stinker.
