Lethal Weapon (dir. Richard Donner, 1987)
You know Lethal Weapon even if you haven’t seen it, right? Two mismatched cops trading wisecracks while solving crimes. Maybe Joe Pesci is hanging around for increasingly strained reasons. That’s what I used to think. For years I never saw a single one of the four films all the way through, and I saw hardly any of the first one. It was like it was one long, convoluted story in which you could only tell when you were chronologically by the length of Mel Gibson’s hair.
Then I sat down and watched the 1987 film and was pleasantly surprised by what a grim, sleazy story it actually is.
Opening audaciously with three naked introductions, we see a woman jump to her death from one of Los Angeles’s half dozen skyscrapers, then see Roger Murtagh (Danny Glover) have his bath interrupted by his entire family, and finally Martin Riggs (Gibson) waking up in the buff while his dog is just hanging around in his beachfront mobile home with the door wide open.
None of this makes any sense to me, but then again, I have socially appropriate levels of shame about nudity.
Murtagh has just turned fifty and is feeling it. Riggs is suicidally depressed after the death of his wife. Neither wants to be the other’s partner, though they are united by their shared service in the Vietnam War, which hangs heavy over everything in the film. The woman who jumped to her death at the beginning is the daughter of another veteran, Michael Hunsaker (Tom Atkins), who is tied to a heroin cartel made up of ex-Special Forces personnel associated with Riggs’s former unit, the CIA front company Air America, and the Phoenix Program.
It’s basically like Shane Black read Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, wrote a deranged buddy cop script set at Christmas, and then the filmmakers hired legit maniacs like Mel Gibson and Gary Busey to make it that much more authentic.
Lethal Weapon is a well made and interesting film, which has sort of been forgotten by the public. Even if you have seen the film, you tend to remember things like Riggs dealing with the yuppie threatening to jump off a building, the scene at the target range, or the completely over-the-top final melee between Riggs and Busey’s Mr. Joshua. Basically accurate descriptions of US complicity in the drug trade are less remembered, for whatever reason. Kind of weird, especially considering that Mel Gibson would star in Air America three years later dealing with the exact same issue.
Perhaps if they had Joe Pesci delivering the exposition audience would have taken more notice.
oliveresque 