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Month: August 2023

Manager, Manage Thyself: Setting Goal

Published by Josh on August 31, 2023

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
– Ron Swanson

There’s a question I typically ask when I start a conversation about setting goals. It’s the lead in to a metaphor, but it’s the sort of thing that only makes sense if there’s a common frame of reference. That question is: “Have you ever seen Charles Barkley swing a golf club?”

Assuming you haven’t, this is what it looked like:

Now, you may not play golf. You may not watch golf. I don’t do a lot of either. But you can probably tell that’s not what that is supposed to look like.

Charles Barkley is a world-class athlete, an NBA Hall of Fame player, and, by all accounts shot in the 70s before his swing turned into, well, that.

What the hell happened?

In the public disaster that is Barkley’s game, there is no definitive black box recording — no single piece of evidence that indicates exactly when all things went to hell.

What there is instead is constant chatter, much of it echoing in Barkley’s head.

“My brain’s got so many voices in it,” Barkley acknowledged earlier this year on GOLF’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.

In his own telling, Barkley’s woes began when he moved to Phoenix, and found that every functioning adult, from the barber to the banker, was either a Tour pro or a Tour pro-wannabe. He felt pressure to improve.

“I started taking lessons from every Tom, Dick and Harry,” Barkley told the Subpar hosts.

https://golf.com/news/features/charles-barkley-golf-swing-where-why-it-went-wrong/

Charles got in his own head. You can see it if you watch closely. The little hitches, adjustments, changes in the middle of what should be a smooth motion. Every piece of advice, every lesson or tip, all consciously or subconsciously being attended to and attempted, as he’s doing something that used to come fairly naturally to him. He’s trying to accomplish ten different things and, in doing so, failing at the one thing he’s trying to do more than anything: hit the ball off the tee.

So, why do I bring this up? Because, whether they realize it or not, this is what many managers do to their people.

Typically, a manager will stare at a dashboard or run through some series of KPIs (or more conspicuously, be run through these stats in some form of review with their boss) and find an outlier. They’ve got an employee that isn’t measuring up the same way everyone else is, or is significantly below means or medians in several areas. In some flavors of organization, it might be a stack rank that ranks well below the stack.

“How are we going to fix this?” They’re asked, or ask themselves.

“We’re going to set some goals!” the manager replies, eager to be seen to be doing something to fix it.1We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.

Out come the directives. Raise this, lower that. Hopefully tied to some form of “Why” and “How” as well, though far too often not. (These are a topic we’ll cover next, in discussing what makes a good goal.)

When the employee leaves their 1×1 (and for all that is holy, I hope they’re getting these goals via an individual discussion during a 1×1 meeting and not from an email or a memo or worse), they’ve got three or four or ten new things they’re being asked to do, starting right now, with the implied or outrightly stated add-on of “or else.”

This person, who has been doing their work the same way for months or years, suddenly learns that everything they’re doing has to change, because of some unfavorable columns on a spreadsheet.

How do you think that affects your people? Well, this is what it did to Charles:

A sane person would quit, and Barkley basically did. He went from playing 200 rounds a year to maybe five, all at charity events around Phoenix. “People wanted to pay their money to come see my swing up close. It was miserable,” he says. “It just sucks playing bad golf and constantly getting made fun of. I just got tired of getting my ass kicked.”

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Charles loved to golf. He was good at it. He was doing everything in his power to try and get better at it. And it made him want to quit.

Do your people love their work as much as he loved golf? What do you think their response will be?

Here’s my take: One goal. Assign at most one goal per month to your people, track their progress on that goal, determine if they’ve implemented it, then move on to the next.

Here’s why:

When you’re giving people a goal, you’re asking them to break a habit or build a new habit. Either stop doing things they way they’ve done them hundreds or thousands of times before, or start doing something brand new to them that upsets a pattern of behavior they’ve settled comfortably into.

Trying to do one of these changes is hard. Trying to do three of them, or five of them, or more, is asking something impossible. You’re setting your people up to fail. And that failure isn’t their fault, it’s yours.

Additionally, psychological research related to habit forming has shown that to reliably create a new habit or break an old one can take between 20-70 days, depending on frequency and attention to the habit. If you’re setting a goal for call center employees, who will be implementing the goal on a dozen or two calls per day, we can probably figure it’ll take around a month to implement and iterate to the point it feels natural.

This gives you time to do the work to reinforce that one goal you’ve set together. You can review their customer interactions to inspect what you expect. You can have a mid-month check-in or two and discuss their progress, listening to calls or reading transcripts together, and making any minor adjustments you might need to implement.

Afterwards, measure the effectiveness of the goal. Did the change have the effect you were hoping for? With that change made, did it make a new opportunity more obvious, or more possible to implement? Take next month and work on that.

Overcorrection and superfluous effort are common issues that come up in many areas. One example I like to point to is canoeing.

If you’ve never been canoeing, there’s a phenomenon that overwhelms new people when they first start to paddle. It happened to me. They become obsessed with going straight.

Canoes, as you can imagine, are not cars. Rather than static roadways, they float through a river of complicated flows, eddies, and currents. Rivers don’t run straight, they don’t flow at the same speeds, and sometimes that means you veer a bit. Additionally, canoes are powered by paddling, which is done on one side of the boat or the other, and due to physical forces, result in the boat turning slightly with each stroke.

Inexperienced paddlers can get a bit distraught at this. They erratically switch sides back and forth every stroke or two, lifting the paddle out, carrying it over the boat, then plunging it back in the other side, all in an effort to keep going straight ahead, to attempt to perfectly correct for these turns and currents. They waste a lot of physical and mental energy on it, all to go slower and get wet.

Instead, all they really need to do is turn the paddle a little at the end of the stroke. It’s called a J-stroke, and it corrects for the little flare out the boat’s nose does with each stroke. It’s easy to implement, a small adjustment to the natural motion of paddling, and has an immediate effect without superfluous effort.

One small change, calmly implemented, repeated consistently, that fixes the problem.

As a manager, implementing this “One Goal” practice takes intent and trust between you and your employee.2And often you and your own manager as well! It requires you to chart a larger path to better results and have the follow-through and patience to make each small change that will culminate in improved performance. Rather than trying to walk the entire trail at once, you’re picking a landmark and walking to that. Then picking another.

Ultimately, the intent is to get from one state of working to another state of working, through the application of small changes, the reaching of visible landmarks, over a period of time. The whole time it will feel like a person being themselves, with one small change they implement until fully absorbed, rather than trying to completely revolutionize what they do in an instant.

Changing someone’s entire structure at once isn’t possible. If it were, everyone would just, y’know, do that. It is, however, entirely possible to change one thing at a time, over time, until what results no longer resembles what it started as.

You can evolve a person’s work towards a better version of what it can be. With patience, partnership, reassurance, and recognition of the effort, you can work with your employee to implement lasting change and achieve the outcomes for which you’ve been working. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

They’ll come out the other side not only improved, but more enthused to work alongside you to continue achieving their goals and improving their performance, because you demonstrated trust, patience, and commitment to working towards a common goal.

So, how did Barkley fix his swing? He changed one thing.

Stan Utley, who had previously worked with former Masters Champion Sergio Garcia on a similar issue, had Charles show him what he was doing privately, in a 1×1 coaching session. He identified one specific coaching point, then had him make a single change to how he moved his hands relative to his swing motion. Charles wouldn’t work on anything additional with Utley for a year.

One change. For a year.

Barkley didn’t see Utley again until a year later, and when they reunited, the hitch had retreated 

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it

Remember how he looked up top? Here’s how Charles looks now:

Charles went on to explain that all those other points, all the clutter that was in his mind every time at the tee, went away. He was able to simplify, focus, and work on that one thing.

“He kind of unclutters my mind,” Barkley said of Utley. “I’ve had like 100 teachers, and all of them are talking to me at the same time. Now, I only listen to one teacher. Golf is a lot more fun when you listen to one teacher instead of a hundred.”

https://clubhouse.swingu.com/lifestyle/meet-the-teacher-who-fixed-charles-barkleys-golf-swing-stan-utley/

One change, and the patience to make it stick.

Notes:

  • 1
    We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.
  • 2
    And often you and your own manager as well!

Manager, Manage Thyself: Empathy

Published by Josh on August 23, 2023

“Have you tried giving a shit?” – Me

Kurt Vonnegut, via the National Endowment for the Humanities

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I’ve been a pretty good manager. The Midwesterner in me inwardly screams at having typed that, even as outwardly he will continue to stoically soldier on. Luckily, I can point to some outward confirmations of such, like annual reviews and statements from bosses and awards and other things, to ease the psychic pain of having said that I was good at something. “It’s not me, it’s these other fools that said it about me.”

As such, I’ve been asked to train and mentor others in managing people, both existing managers and those who are on a managerial track. I’ve spoken at conferences on the subject, and at staff meetings. These folks often ask if there’s any sort of key to being a good manager, or some method I use that others can learn from.

In all honesty, I think it boils down to one main thing, that everything else seems to stem from: “Try giving a shit.”

Truly give a shit. You have to care about other people more than you care about yourself, or your own success, or metrics, or any other way of measuring your own accomplishments. If you can manage that, to actually care and not just try to look like you care, people don’t just see that, they feel it, and they respond to it.

Alright, that’s it, lesson over! Now get out there and manage!

…

…

Ok, fine, I’ll elaborate a little more.

Most businesses (and for our purposes, all the businesses I’ll be talking about) have, at the other end of their operating space, a customer. It might be a retail user of the product, it might be a corporate representative using a SaaS implementation. It doesn’t really make that much of a difference, in the grand scheme of things. It boils down to your person on one end and their person on the other.

There’s a long-standing adage in business that is, in my opinion, often misunderstood. That saying is “The customer is always right.” This doesn’t mean that the customer is always correct. What it means, in my view at least, is that the customer always has a sincerely held belief, that they come in with. Whether that’s what they think they’re looking for or what their problem is, it is vital to meet them with that piece in mind. That they sincerely believe they are correct.

Relating to someone else’s viewpoint is the essence of empathy. I’ll point to the Brené Brown classic for a deeper dive on empathy and how it is distinct from sympathy:

What is important to understand is that you’re not acknowledging right nor wrong, you’re acknowledging how the person on the other side of the conversation feels and relating to their feeling this way. You’re demonstrating that you really, truly care about them, and that your ultimate goal is to improve that state of being via your intervention or capacity or capability or otherwise.

They way I often describe this to front-line customer service people is to explain that whenever someone calls in for help, they have two problems. The first is the one they tell us about: that their phone stopped working, or that they can’t access their account, or so on. The second problem is often either alluded to or completely unstated, but is the actual issue that drove someone, even knowing how they generally feel about calling customer service, to decide to spend what could be hours of their life on the phone.

That problem is that they’ve lost trust in the institution behind that product or service. It caused them emotional or, in even more tragic circumstances, physical pain. Their trust has been violated and they feel angry or upset or aggrieved.

Just about everyone has a story about a time they’ve had a problem and had to contact some Customer Service team for help, and had a terrible experience. If you listen to enough of these stories (and if you hope to get better at coaching people to be better at customer service, bad customer service stories are very enlightening, so I highly encourage you to listen to a LOT of them, if you can), there’s a piece that ties every one of them together. It might be stated, or implied, or grumbled about, but what you’ll hear, in one form or another, is “They didn’t care.”

If you think back to your own customer service horror stories, I’d bet a considerable sum that the reason it was terrible, and not just a forgettably poor experience, comes down to feeling like someone didn’t care, did everything they could to get you off the phone or handed off to someone else, and refused to hear to you, if they even bothered to listen you.

So, two problems: the technical problem and the emotional problem. The way to fix the emotional problem, which is nearly impossible to solve in isolation, is to marry it to the technical problem. The essence of it is: You have a problem. I care about you, and so I care about the problem you’re having. Let’s work together to solve the technical problem, and by doing so, work to restore the emotional problem we’ve now tied to it.

Now, I’m clearly simplifying here, and the real work goes into teaching people how to respond constructively and empathetically, and to not just sound like they care, but truly care about other people. However, whenever I’ve taught this theory to front-line advisors, they’ve instantly improved in their interpersonal efforts with customers. We’ve done nothing at all to improve the quality of their issue recognition, isolation, or instructive ability, and yet their overall customer satisfaction increases.

All because they’ve learned how to care, and to show the people they’re working with that they truly give a shit.

“Cool,” you, my imagined reader, might be saying, “that’s how to teach customer service people about fixing customer satisfaction issues. But you said you were going to tell me how to be better at managing people.”

Except I did. This all translates. As a manager, you serve your people. They are your customers, and you work for them. And the work you’re looking to do together is to improve their performance (their technical problem) by connecting with them as people first. Connect with what drives them, what their goals are, not your goals for them or the goals the company has set. Hear them and listen to them.

Don’t be like Billy, kids.

In short, give a shit about them as people, not as collections of statistics or lines in some scoreboard. Care more. Care conspicuously.

Employees, just like customers, all have stories about bad bosses. They come in many flavors, many anecdotes and stories. But just as before, I can tell you the common factor all those experiences have in common. “They didn’t care about me.”

If your people know you care, that you’re there for them as people and are working for their benefit, they develop trust with you. Trust that you have their best interests, not just the company’s, at heart. And when they trust you, they’ll walk through walls with you. As long as they know they’re doing so alongside you.

(The topic of Trust being the core value that’s broken in most relationships isn’t my novel insight. Patrick Lencioni points to it as the core disfunction of relationships, especially power relationships, in his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

I’m not a big business book guy, but this is one I feel comfortable recommending. Also, if you use my link to buy it, I might be able to get a fancy cup of coffee.)

Demonstrate that you care, that you have empathy for them, and with them, and that the goal in improving their capacity to do their jobs is to improve their overall lived experience. That you’re invested in them as people. That you care.

Give a shit, and they will too.

RIGGS! — A numerical review of the Lethal Weapon films

Published by Josh on August 22, 2023

Part 1: Lethal Weapon (Original recipe)

via Wikimedia

By way of introduction, let me explain what the hell I’m doing investigating a 36 year-old movie.

Lethal Weapon is in the pantheon of highly syndicated movies like Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, and others that are regularly replayed on basic cable to fill two to three (and increasingly with commercial bloat, four) hours in the middle of a channel’s scheduling. Safe, tested viewing options that the average American male will stop at as they loop through the guide and think “Eh, that’ll do.” As a member of the above classification, I’ve conservatively seen Lethal Weapon and its sequels a good thirty to forty times, at various levels of attention.

When one watches these movies, patterns start to emerge. Common catch phrases, tropes, settings, and etcetera that overlap each other to the point of conscious recognition. One specific to the Lethal Weapon series is one proper noun, a single syllable, said with such frequency as to be inescapable.

That word is “Riggs.” Or, as it is most often expressed, “RIIIIIIGGS!!”

Danny Glover’s Roger Murtaugh says, shouts, pleads, mutters, and scolds with each usage of the word, in his continual relationship with Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs, his loose cannon partner over the course of four films and eleven years (so far).

Naturally (he says, using the term to assure him his curiosity is absolutely normal and not some effect of mild autistic tendencies) one begins to wonder at the question that brings me here today and for three more installments to come: How many times does Murtaugh say Riggs throughout the series?

Both a cursory and a more in-depth search through the internet didn’t surface the answer. And so, with some time on my hands during a period between gigs, I decided to put my shoulder to the wheel and do the work on behalf of those, like me, who just can’t seem to live with not knowing a thing.

Join me over the course of four (probably WAY too long) articles where I take a look back at the Lethal Weapon series through fresh eyes, note some things that come to mind in the viewing, and do a little counting.

Plot: Two mismatched detectives, a 20-year homicide veteran and a wild narcotics officer, are thrust together to investigate a young woman’s suicide that turns into an investigation of murder, organized crime, and the after effects of the CIA’s adventures running heroin out of SE Asia. Coincidentally, just three years later, Gibson will star in Air America, where he plays a pilot unknowingly making heroin runs out of SE Asia on behalf of the CIA (alongside Robert Downey, Jr).

Shane Black in Predator
via https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1673490/why-shane-black-was-killed-off-so-soon-in-predator

Written by Shane Black, who first came to wider fame as the initial member of a covert assault team killed by the Predator that same year, Lethal Weapon is the first in Black’s series of two-fisted buddy cop (and cop-adjacent) movies, including Lethal Weapon 2, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Nice Guys. For a man with a distinct style, each repetition of the pattern finds a new way to build entertaining plots through fully-formed characters interacting and driving a story forward.

Richard Donner and Mel Gibson
via https://deadline.com/2021/07/mel-gibson-richard-donner-lethal-weapon-director-memorium-1234786394/

Rather than the start of a journey, Lethal Weapon marked a high point in director Richard Donner’s career as well as the beginning of a directorial relationship with Mel Gibson, who would go on to star in three more Lethal Weapon movies directed by Donner, as well as the film adaptation of the TV show Maverick and Conspiracy Theory.

It’s beginning to look kind of like Christmas?
via https://www.wptv.com/entertainment/movies/5-christmas-movies-that-arent-really-about-christmas

Lethal Weapon is among the pantheon of “Is it a Christmas Movie?” movies. It’s clearly set during Christmas, though A) doesn’t outright play with the sort of Christmas tropes that makes one yearn for a warm fire and the (time-limited) comfort of family, and B) takes place in Los Angeles, which has a dearth of the usual markers of Christmas like, well, snow. Unless one counts the massive rail of cocaine the movie’s femme fatal (🥁), Amanda Hunsaker (Jackie Swanson), does in the first minute of the film, before leaping off a balcony to her death and kicking off the plot.

Shane Black himself notes that he likes to set movies around Christmas, as he did with Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, and The Nice Guys.

“It tends to be a touchstone for me,” he admits. “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives. I tend to think also that it just informs as a backdrop. The first time I noticed it was Three Days of the Condor, the Sydney Pollack film, where Christmas in the background adds this really odd, chilling counterpoint to the espionage plot. I also think that Christmas is just a thing of beauty, especially as it applies to places like Los Angeles, where it’s not so obvious, and you have to dig for it, like little nuggets. One night, on Christmas Eve, I walked past a Mexican lunch wagon serving tacos, and I saw this little string, and on it was a little broken plastic figurine, with a light bulb inside it, of the Virgin Mary. And I thought, that’s just a little hidden piece of magic. You know, all around the city are little slices, little icons of Christmas, that are as effective and beautiful in and of themselves as any 40-foot Christmas tree on the lawn of the White House. So that, in a lot of words, is the answer.”

https://ew.com/article/2016/05/25/shane-black-christmas/

Background now shoved to the background, let us begin our attentive and accountative1I have an English degree. One of the perks of this means I get to make up words for things. walkthrough of the movie.

We’re introduced to fist one of our two-fisted team, Detective Sgt. Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) naked in the bathtub, as his entire family stomps in with a lit cake to celebrate his 50th birthday. Over the course of four movies, the bathroom of his home will play an oddly pivotal role in events.

On the opposite side, we first meet fist #2, Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) naked in a trailer on a beach, smoking in bed. His first line is a belch. Whether there is metaphorical relevance to the fact that we first meet both our heroes naked I leave up to the reader.

This early in Mel Gibson’s career, he’s still halfway into his American accent, with bits of the Australian slipping in from line to line. Over the course of the four films, he settles into the accent, but in the first installment, he sounds like a man caught on both sides of the Pacific, especially when hitting diphthongs.

Our first Three Stooges reference comes as Riggs handles a drug bust in the center of a Christmas Tree yard, with a “nyuk nyuk”, a slap, and an eye-poke to the huddled drug dealers.

And then kills three of them.

After concluding the arrest, Riggs settles in at home to weeping over a picture of his dead wife, Bugs Bunny playing at Bob Cratchit on the TV, and the taste of his 9mm Beretta.2If you or someone you love is struggling with suicidal thoughts or ideation, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline  at 988 (para ayuda en español, llame al 988). The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Call 911 in life-threatening situations. If you are worried about a friend’s social media updates, you can contact safety teams at the social media company . They will reach out to connect the person with the help they need.

After he pulls himself from the edge, we’re introduced to two series regulars, Captain Ed Murphy (Steve Kahan, who made a career of playing police officers, with at least 14 such roles, including all four Lethal Weapon films) and the police psychologist (who remains unnamed until the fourth installment) Stephanie Woods (Mary Ellen Trainor, who had an all-star character acting run in the mid-late 80s as the MacGuffin of Romancing the Stone, Elaine Wilder, Mikey’s mother Mrs. Walsh in The Goonies, newscaster Beth Wallins in Die Hard, and here), filling in some plot regarding Riggs’ tragic backstory. The “is he crazy or crazy like a fox” question will carry the character dynamic between Riggs and Murtaugh throughout the film, and highlight the ways in which the culture of the times struggled to identify and address true mental health crises.

The meeting of Riggs and Murtaugh comes at the 21:18 mark, after Murtaugh mistakes his new partner for an armed arrestee, with our first “I’m too old for this shit.” Murtaugh will only continue to get too older, and there will only be more of this shit to come.

Their relationship starts over talk about sidearms and Vietnam, leading to Roger dropping the title of the movie, noting “I guess we’ll have to register you as a lethal weapon.”

via Imgur

We’re then introduced to Mr. Joshua (Gary Busey), the first of our two antagonists, in what might be a more hinged role considering his oeuvre, being introduced by General MacAllister3I’m guessing on the spelling, he only gets listed in the credits as ‘The General’ (Mitchell Ryan) via his burning arm trick, to set a certain tone at the outset of a heroin deal. Busey, in a fun bit of cross-polination, will in fact reunite with Danny Glover in the sequel to Shane Black’s film debut in Predator 2, set in the streets of Los Angeles amid a drug war. 

Riggs and Murtaugh travel to meet with Michael Hunsaker (Tom Atkins, non-Maniac Cop, non-Bruce Campbell star of Maniac Cop), covering some more plot and developing Murtaugh’s backstory before they respond to a jumper at a nearby flooring store. 

Riggs crawls his way out onto the ledge alongside the jumper, empathizing a little too well for anyone’s comfort, before handcuffing himself to the jumper and, well, jumping. An air-filled bag, somewhere around 60’x60’x20′ in size, set up without a sound, literally below their feet, arrests their fall. Sure, let’s roll with it.

Murtaugh, pushed to his limit, drags Riggs into the mattress store across the street to fully suss out whether he’s playing at crazy or actually nuts. Murtaugh learns definitively that it’s the latter. He’s definitely too old for this shit.

After a bit of exposition on their drive, with Murtaugh lamenting his birthday gift being a suicidal partner, we arrive at Amanda Hunsaker’s pimp’s (I presume pimp? It isn’t explicitly stated, but it seems like he’s her pimp) residence where the first of the series’ many gunfights takes place. A bit of bonding is done as Riggs takes down the drug dealer, who Murtaugh thought he had pacified with a shot to the leg.

Gratitude at having saved his life leads Murtaugh to invite Riggs home for dinner.4Easter Egg for Lethal Weapon 2: An End Apartheid in South Africa sticker slapped on the side of the fridge. We get some “Riggs!” head fakes with Roger introducing his partner and referring to him as Martin several times. A cute dinner scene with Martin at dinner catching eyes from Roger’s daughter Rianne (played by an “and introducing” credited Traci Wolfe) and being the subject of some rough beatboxing leads to more exposition chewing on the first of Murtaugh’s boats in the driveway. 

This leads right up to our first Riggs of the series! On his way to head home, Roger tosses out a quick “Hey, hey Riggs? You really like my wife’s cooking?”

“No,” Martin replies with a subtle grin. “Seeya tomorrow.”

Roger then settles in for a glass of milk before bed, as well as a review of some evidence including Amanda Hunsaker’s porn debut and a flip through a class yearbook, in which we learn we’re leaning heavily into the tropes: Amanda’s got a twin sister!

Roger is awoken to the warm smell of Folgers in his cup being waved under his nose by an unexpectedly appearing Riggs, leading to the pair starting to walk through their very thin theory regarding Dixie, the witness and “hooker,”51987 was not yet a turning point for positivity towards sex work. having poisoned Amanda. The conversation continues at the police firing range, another regular setting in the series, where Martin shows off the skills that let him take a 1000yd shot in the wind in Laos. “8 or 10 guys in the world could make that shot,” he says, and I think every one of them has starred in an action movie. Murtaugh, seeking a challenge, takes a single shot at a fresh target and hits his target square in the forehead, before Riggs, shipping the target even further down range, paints a smiley face around the shot in bullet holes.

Following up on their thin theory, Martin and Murtaugh head down to question Dixie, past the taunting of the local 6 year olds, before being thrown backwards as her house explodes.6Continuity Error! Both actors are wearing some previously unseen thick glasses, one regular, one sun, presumably to protect against the coming blast in the house, which disappear after the house explodes. Their thin theory has thickened considerably.

After the explosion, they find a mercury switch, which indicates a professional was at work. The theory is confirmed when questioning the local six year olds finds little Alfred pointing out that the bomber had the same Special Forces tattoo that Riggs wears on his arm.

They head down to question Michael Hunsaker again (at a location that I would swear is a funeral, but isn’t entirely clearly established) realizing that his daughter’s death is more than a simple drug-related killing. Hunsaker fills in the rest of the plot, pointing to involvement with Air America, the CIA’s operation in Laos moving heroin for funding and pushing the strategy of the Vietnam War in secret.

One thing you can’t say about Lethal Weapon films is that they aim for small themes. CIA illegal drug trades, the anti-Apartheid movement, Chinese human trafficking, and the sorry state of gun control all play thematic roles in the stories of the series.

Hunsaker explains that he and the Shadow Company group under the General7Not that one, though that is an insanely funny mental image. started moving heroin again using old contacts, washing the funds through Hunsaker’s bank.

Cue the appearance of Mr. Joshua via helicopter, with Hunsaker holding a quart box of egg nog incredibly conspicuously and several holes getting punched through it, and him.

via Imgur

Cut to the streets during a rainstorm, with Riggs questioning a local streetwalker, looking for a connection to Dixie. Out flies Mr. Joshua again, throwing Riggs through a window with a shotgun blast.

Riggs realizes it was the same person who shot Hunsaker from the helicopter and decides to play possum. As they talk through their plan, they get a call from police dispatch that the boy Roger’s daughter was dating was murdered and arrive to his house to learn that she’s been kidnapped. Poor dimpled kid doesn’t even get a whiff of screen time.

After a terse moment, discussing what needs to be done, the Murtaugh gets a call to meet at a dry lake bed, where we get our big action setup for the movie. Riggs is dropped off among some scrub brush, where he does a ducking little jog before setting up his sniping position with his rifle. Meanwhile, Roger drives out to be met by a limo, a Suburban, and a low-flying helicopter. Why this particular meet takes fourteen men via three vehicles coming from land and air is beyond me, but I suppose Mr. Joshua appreciates an entrance.

After a ruse with a smoke grenade, Riggs and Murtaugh take out half of the mercenaries before General McAllister finds Riggs in his sniping position and Murtaugh surrenders to overwhelming firepower. Meanwhile somehow a helicoper is able to stop Rianne in a speeding limo, halting her escape. For the record: playing chicken with a 747? No. Playing chicken with a limousine? Sure.

Off we go to a warehouse for a little early-career torture porn for Mel Gibson. We find him strung up in a jerry rigged shower and electrically shocked by 80’s character actor Al Leong, playing Endo, who has “forgotten more about dispensing pain than” either Busey or Gibson will ever know.

Leong has a great run through the 80’s in Big Trouble in Little China, Die Hard and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He also later re-appears in Lethal Weapon 4 as a member of the Triad. You can’t keep a good character actor down!

Or underfed, for that matter. Via https://www.vulture.com/2013/07/die-hard-scene-stealers-tidbits.html

Murtaugh meanwhile catches some literal salt in some open wounds. Neither are willing to talk.

Riggs is about to be killed by Endo before a headbut and a remarkable display of “some of that jiu jitsu shit” we were promised in the initial meeting.

A quick half-naked firefight and some unnecessary puns lead to an escape from the warehouse that somehow leads back to the bar from our initial introduction to Mr. Joshua, on Hollywood Blvd. The geography of this sequence is…confused.

Body Count: 23 (4 in the mechanical room and escaping it, including one via a very 80’s movie neck-snap),  5 during the escape through the bar(including one from Mr. Joshua spraying the crowd and killing a bystander. Somehow, with all the wanton shooting, this is the only innocent bystander to be killed.))

After spilling outside chasing Mr. Joshua, Busey steals a car conveniently missing a rearview mirror and drives off down the boulevard, spraying the crowd with an M-16 yet hitting zero further bystanders. Riggs and Murtaugh run after him on foot, chasing and firing with very specific accuracy.

Murtagh sends Riggs after Mr. Joshua while he circles back to find General McAllister.

Firing wildly from the 3rd St Bridge, Riggs peppers Mr. Joshua’s car, sending it aflame into a light post, where he ditches it to escape on foot. Some continuing gunplay in traffic seems not to hit a single bystander before Mr. Joshua commendeers yet another car missing a rearview mirror to escape.

Meanwhile, Riggs finds McAllister in an alley, making his own escape attempt, where he repeats his shooting range performance, putting one through the driver of the escape car’s forehead. This leads to the car careening off in front of a bus, being thrown up into the air and landing inverted in the street, where it ignites and detonates a pile of grenades and heroin. The callbacks just keep calling back.

After reuniting amid a cloud of heroin dust, Riggs and Murtagh realize that Mr. Joshua must be enroute to Roger’s home, commendeering a police car to take them there.

Two apparently uninformed cops standing guard outside are caught by surprise and gunned down before Busey runs into the house in search of the rest of the Murtaugh family.

Somehow managing to beat his substantial head start, they leave a note on the tree for him, then bait him by throwing an empty police cruiser through the Murtaughs’ living room window. The Murtaugh house takes a considerable beating over the course of these films, from bullets, police vehicles, toilet explosions, termite damage, rogue nail guns, and intentionally set fires.

We’re finally treated to three more Riggs!s in quick succession as Martin and Mr. J have a mano a mano duel in the front yard. #4 comes as more of a descriptor than a call, as Murtaugh makes clear that Riggs is the arresting officer in our little hydrant-soaked street fight. #5 is issued while he cheers Riggs on during the fight, followed by #6 as Roger throws him a nightstick to even the odds after Joshua attacks with the house’s decorative lamppost.

Murtaugh begs to help, but Riggs remains determined to fight him alone. Some more wrestling around in the mud and Riggs gets Mr. Joshua in a solid figure-four headlock, choking him nearly to death before letting off and declaring victory.

Exhausted, the pair embrace, only for Mr. Joshua to pull a gun off the arresting offer, before, in an exaggerated bit of slow-motion filmmaking, the partners each draw their weapon and put Mr. Joshua down on the lawn.

Our denouement comes with Riggs visiting the Murtaughs on Christmas, delivering his suicidal ideation MacGuffin to Rianne to hand to Roger. As he turns to leave, Roger comes shuffling outside to deliver our final Riggs of the film, demanding Martin join them for Christmas dinner.

After magnanimously inviting Riggs’ dog Sam (Sam the Dog) to join them for dinner as well, who our Foley artist indicates is not a fan of the Murtaughs’ cat Burbank (Burbank the Cat) we finish with 5/6ths of a catchphrase, as the last line of the film is “I’m too old for this.” before we roll the credits.

And so, to close out our exercise, our totals for Lethal Weapon:

Early on, Murtaugh often refers to his partner as Martin or Kid, which cut our total down substantially. As we’ll see over the course of the series, he settles further into the use of one name over all the others.

Join me next time as we count our Riggs!s, contemplate the legal limits of diplomatic immunity, and see if Little Joey still can sing, with Lethal Weapon 2.

Notes:

  • 1
    I have an English degree. One of the perks of this means I get to make up words for things.
  • 2
    If you or someone you love is struggling with suicidal thoughts or ideation, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline  at 988 (para ayuda en español, llame al 988). The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Call 911 in life-threatening situations. If you are worried about a friend’s social media updates, you can contact safety teams at the social media company . They will reach out to connect the person with the help they need.
  • 3
    I’m guessing on the spelling, he only gets listed in the credits as ‘The General’
  • 4
    Easter Egg for Lethal Weapon 2: An End Apartheid in South Africa sticker slapped on the side of the fridge.
  • 5
    1987 was not yet a turning point for positivity towards sex work.
  • 6
    Continuity Error! Both actors are wearing some previously unseen thick glasses, one regular, one sun, presumably to protect against the coming blast in the house, which disappear after the house explodes.
  • 7
    Not that one, though that is an insanely funny mental image.