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.