Category: Under Review

Part 2: Lethal Weapon 2 (Peri-Peri style)

Welcome back to my public hyperfixation, folks! Today we’re diving into the second installment in the Lethal Weapon series, the last written by Shane Black, with a running counter for Danny Glover’s utterances of “Riggs”, among other things. Off we go!

Lethal Weapon 2 continues a pattern for Lethal Weapon films, kicking off with a cold open before stepping into our main plot line, with themes and B stories foreshadowed in the offing.

In our opening car chase, we join Riggs and Murtaugh driving Trish’s station wagon, screaming through a tunnel in hot pursuit of a suspect in a BMW. Trish’s poor car is in for a rough existence and finishes the film barely functional and completely uninsurable.

Screaming out of the tunnel, we intersect with one of our new supporting characters for the film, Detective Tim Cavanaugh (Dean Norris, who had a notable supporting role in Total Recall, but is more recently renowned for his role as Breaking Bad’s Hank Schrader).

We catch our first of many Riggs’s as the suspects they’re after sit up out the window of their car and fire off two shotgun rounds, taking out the station wagon’s windshield. 

After some rough maneuvering through a hotel roundabout, Riggs takes off on foot after a car once again, having learned no lessons from the previous movie. As Murtaugh catches up, he fires off four Riggs’s in quick succession, our first indicator that the rate of Riggsing is set to skyrocket compared to the first film.

Turning to Norris’s chase, the suspects in the second car are cornered at the top of an overpass, where, after some indiscriminate automatic weapons fire, have somehow managed to bring in a helicopter to facilitate their escape. There’s either a surplus of affordable helicopters in Los Angeles or some very lax licensing requirements, as so far, every organization seems to have their mitts on one or more.

Meanwhile, Riggs and Murtaugh corner the suspect in the BMW, who flips his car into a storefront. After a quick Riggs to scold him for his driving, the pair introduce a new trope, disagreeing about whether “On 3” means on 3 or after 3.

Their quarry escaping, they search the area for him, including his trunk, and find a pile of krugerrands. That, combined with a bit of Afrikaans over the radio, is our introduction to a South African flavor to the installment.

Back at the station, Murtaugh and the Captain have a quick walk and gripe before cutting to Riggs showing off his straight jacket escape trick to the Detective pool. As Riggs flails about, we get a quick look at a whole host of character actors as supporting cast, including Meagan Shapiro (Jenette Goldstein, Aliens’ Private Vasquez) and Eddie Esteban (Nestor Serrano, who is a certified “Hey, it’s that guy” actor, with 128 roles in everything from 24 to The Day After Tomorrow to The Money Pit), They think they’re about to collect on a bet that he can’t escape within 5 minutes, before Riggs shows his stupid human trick: That he can dislocate his shoulder at will. I’m sure that won’t come up again later.

After popping his shoulder sickeningly back into the socket, we get a quick visit from series regular (the still unnamed) Stephanie Woods.

Afterwards, we catch a Riggs as reproval, as he spills to the detective pool that Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne will be starring in a commercial. He arrives home to show off the new addition on the house (that surely won’t end up in a shambles later) and chit chat with his carpenter (literally, he just gets “Carpenter” in the billing) (Jack McKee, another veteran character actor with 222 roles from Basic Instinct to Moneyball to episode parts in all three CSIs). He fires off a nailgun, making the detectives jump and ensuring that we see it being placed on the proverbial mantle for later.

Some quick banter indoors before Rianne’s big break, reminding us that in the late 80s we were very concerned with dolphin-safe tuna, and then we see the main event: Seems she’s the new face of Ramses Extra condoms. Roger is…nonplussed.

Off we go to a very turn of the 90s office, in sharp grays with a giant fish tank, before meeting the two villains of this installment, Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland, who, after a long career in Europe, came to prominence in the US with this role, followed by The Mighty Ducks, The Hunt for Red October, and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, where he catches one hell of a melvin.) and Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O’Connor, for whom this was his largest role, but who also had parts in Brazil, Alias, and the Daredevil movie). 

The subject of our earlier chase scene, Hans (Mark Rolston, who might be most recognized as Andy Dufresne’s nemesis in The Shawshank Redemption), steps over some very conspicuous plastic sheeting on the floor. His reward for losing the million dollars in krugerrands is a bullet to the head and an epitaph from Pieter making a pun about drop cloths.

As Pieter wraps up the body, they discuss their plans to handle an overbearing police presence, specifically our lead detective, Sgt. Murtaugh.

We cut to Riggs and Trish Murtaugh, him making dinner, her parcelling out various plastic bags of medication, and telling us the backstory of how Riggs’ wife died, in a car accident, and its tie-in with a gold pen Trish found in the laundry. It’s a bit of backstory we’ll come back to later. 

Afterwards, Riggs is at home, drinking with Sam the dog, and watching the Three Stooges, which Sam seems to enjoy as much as Riggs does.

Meanwhile, Roger tosses and turns in bed, then wakes to find four balaclavaed men duct-taping he and Trish. Pieter and his crew hover over them, delivering a clear threat to back off the investigation, with some rather racist invective.

Back at the station, after Roger fills his partner in and a fateful detectives’ poker game is organized, they’re assigned to watch an informant waiting on behalf of the FBI. One Leo Getz.

Welcome Joe Pesci to the series! (I’ll not do you the disservice of assuming you don’t know Joe Pesci’s other work, including his album Little Joe Sure Can Sing.)

Leo’s a fixer, a money launderer, and later a real estate agent, and then a private detective. For now, he’s a state’s witness with a nervous tick for the word “Ok”. No, I will not count the Oks, ok? Ok.

“Room service” arrives to deliver the wrong meal and a bullet for desert, before Riggs rushes him and sends them both, plus Leo, out what might be the most easily broken hotel window in history, down somewhere around 7 stories, and into the hotel pool. Shane Black really loves a pool gag.¹Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon.

A little mixup in the water has Riggs punching out Leo’s nose as the assailant makes a getaway. While they catch their breath poolside and Murtaugh catches up, Leo explains just why someone is trying to kill him: he laundered half a billion dollars in drug money. Which, yeah, that’d probably do it.

A quick clip of Rudd and Vorstedt complaining they missed their shot and we head to the Murtaugh residence to watch Riggs and Murtaugh eat cold spaghetti straight from a the container while Leo explains how money laundering works. 

While the modern television viewer has been well informed about money laundering via Breaking Bad, Ozark, and many other crime dramas, viewers in this era might not be clear on the workings. Unfortunately, Leo’s explanation seems a bit muddled and doesn’t cover how any of this avoids KYC laws or deposit limits or whatnot. It is, however, a rather stock method for laundering funds utilizing a lack of knowledge around who the beneficial owner is of the dummy corporation doing the switcheroo. 

Leo explains that he keeps a 2% fee for his trouble, which means he pulled in $10M or so from the standard laundry setup before he skimmed his extra piece off the top. Which, considering how prosperous the work already was, makes one wonder why an extra 10-20 thousand here and there was worth it in the end. I suppose that’s an unfamiliarity with the criminal mindset for you.

Anyhow, Leo shrinks Riggs’ shirt and then recalls the one connection he had to the dealers directly: a house up in the Hollywood Hills and a man named Hans. Hans might be tricky to track down, given we watched him rolled up in a plastic drop cloth fifteen minutes ago, but the house is still standing. For now.

Arriving at the home built into a hillside, Riggs sneaks in pretending to be a pool cleaner (Shane LOVES a pool gag) and finds two besuited men in the middle of counting out bills. They’re interrupted by a third, our fake hotel waiter, who runs off in a tow truck, with Riggs, as always, chasing after on foot.

One more Riggs out of Danny Glover, plus one from Pesci that doesn’t count here, and they’re off in pursuit in Trish’s station wagon once again.

A high-speed chase through the Hollywood Hills has Riggs lose his gun, and then Leo and Murtaugh inexplicably stopping to pick it up from the side of the road. Their vision here is absolutely incredible. They’re speeding down the road, in pursuit of Riggs and the “waiter”, and yet not only see the gun on the side of the road, they stop in time for Leo to run out and retrieve it, before picking up the chase. I can only assume this was thrown in to fix some continuity error later.

Off we go down the road before the wackiest bit of hijinks yet finds the tow-truck at a complete stop, Murtaugh running into the car it’s towing, shooting it up over the lowered flatbed, then THAT car impacting with a truck carrying a surfboard, which flies off back in the opposite direction and kills our “bellhop”. The physics and circumstance here are incredible, for both senses of the word.²Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering

Back at the house on stilts, the entire detective core rushes the house, finding the earlier money men, plus Arjen and Pieter, where Arjen introduces himself to the detectives as the Minister of Diplomatic Affairs for the South African consulate, and explains that everyone there works for the consulate as well. A quick Riggs out of Glover produces a reaction of recognition in Pieter, who confirms he has The Martin Riggs in his presence.

Arjen goes on to explain that “under the Diplomatic Relations Act, no diplomatic agent may be detained or arrested once his identity has been established.” He goes on to threaten to talk with the State Department, and claim that the house is owned by the South African government, and so is South African territory.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to get deep into the weeds on how this isn’t actually how diplomatic immunity works (for more, go listen to Stuff You Should Know (https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-diplomatic-immunity) or read any of the other explainers on the internet about it). This being a movie, we’re just gonna go with it for the sake of enjoying things. Plus, why ruin the climax?

Upstairs, Riggs literally bumps into another member of the consulate, Rika Van Den Haas (Patsy Kensit, who got her start in The Great Gatsby at 4 years old, per IMDB) for a little meet cute.

A little more exposition at the station and then at Miss Van Den Haas’s apartment, and we get to Arjen making clear more needs to be done about the police issue.

A quick trip to Subway and we get the first of a series of Leo Getz rants about places they fuck you. In this instance, they fuck you at the drive-through. Later installments let us know we also get fucked with the cellphones.

The next day, Martin does some very conspicuous tailing of Rudd, following him back to the consulate where a crowd of protesters is gathered outside, to rally for an end to Apartheid and the freeing of Nelson Mandela.³Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison. Upstairs, Rika seems rather charmed by Martin’s antics on the CC TV.

Arriving back at home, Riggs finds Leo cleaning his beach trailer, where he gets a call that Murtaugh hasn’t checked in for the day. Over at the Murtaugh residence, Riggs hears Roger yelling from inside and, upstairs, finds him sitting on the toilet, in what might be the most classic bit from the film.

Riggs explains the situation: that he sat down on the commode the night before for some quiet time, reading about marlin fishing, and found a note on the toilet paper saying “Boom! You’re dead!” 

A little fun wordplay about scaring the shit out of him, then Riggs leans down to find a stack of explosives running to a wire at the back of the toilet.

One quick “Riggs” as Roger begs him to keep it quiet, before we get every emergency service organization in LA out on the front lawn.

Jarvis Becker from the bomb squad (Kenneth Tigar, who has a long career of TV work and will reunite with Donner and Gibson in Conspiracy Theory) explains how they’ll look to freeze the bomb with liquid nitrogen while Roger dives into the cast iron tub, and here we have our second Mythbusters plot of the movie⁴Covered in Episode 178: https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb, this one confirmed! Not only could Riggs have pulled Murtaugh off the toilet in time, but the liquid nitrogen would have stalled the explosion long enough to have worked, as well as the cast iron tub protecting from lethal concussive force from 1 kg of C-4. As outlandish as the situation is, it’s apparently incredibly accurately rendered.

It turns out Murtaugh isn’t too old for this shit (🥁). After some quick clarification this time on whether On 3 means on 3 or ON 3, they share a brief moment between men, then dive for the tub.

The station wagon suffers once again as the toilet is thrown onto its hood, but the boys come through mostly unscathed.

Afterwards, we cut to the Consulate where Leo and Roger kick off a little gag about emigrating to South Africa, as a distraction, while Riggs sneaks upstairs for some snooping.

Up in the fancy 80’s office, Riggs does some light diplomatic threatening before a quick “Hey Moe!” and some violence against the fish tank.⁵Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope!

Downstairs, he runs into Rika again before meeting up with Murtaugh and Getz in the car, showing them a note reading “Alba Varden, Thursday.” But who is Alba Varden?

A quick cut back to the office for us to be sure Rudd and Vorstedt noticed Riggs took the note and we’re off to the supermarket, where Riggs runs into Rika yet again, to give her some advice about grocery shopping in America after a little light stalking. Martin insists on Rika coming to his place for dinner, throws in another Stooges bit, then drags her off to the beach.

Rika and Martin have a conversation about how Arjen is using his credentials to commit crimes, before we see some more of those crimes play out.

Pieter executes one detective in their home, then Shapiro blows up on the diving board of her pool in what must have been a fun day for the stuntwoman. (LOVES a pool gag.)

Martin and Rika start to get friendly, before we see another explosion, this time at Cavanaugh’s house during the planned poker game.

The Captain puts calls out to find the officers who haven’t been killed, and we see Riggs and Rika continuing their fun evening in, then find Murtaugh and Getz holed up at a hotel. Roger realizes where he’d seen Alba Varden before and drags Leo back to his house to review a video he took from his boat to confirm his suspicion (though not before Leo lets us know he’s really enjoying Rianne’s commercial work).

Meanwhile outside, Leo is taken away by some “consulate employees” and Murtaugh fends off an attack from a third, then a fourth, before putting the nail gun to a use almost certainly forbidden in the user manual. “Nailed ‘em both.” is our reward. He stumbles back outside to realize Leo, and the poor, poor station wagon, are gone.

Back at the beach, amid a roll in the sheets, two helicopters come storming in over the ocean and light up the trailer with automatic weapons fire. Under a rain of bullets, Martin and Rika escape out Sam’s door in the floor, then Rika makes a run for the truck as the helicopters land nearby.

Martin, meanwhile, throws in another “Hey Moe!” while taking out two of the South Africans on the beach, then kills three more while spraying bullets from the roof of the trailer.

Martin takes out one more in the other helicopter while they collect Sam and head back to Rika’s apartment. After an extended goodbye, Riggs is ambushed while Rika is collected offscreen.

Down at the dock we find Pieter and a burlap-sacked Riggs having a conversation about their previously untold history together. Pieter explains that Riggs was investigating their organization 4 years prior and they put out a contract on him. Pieter, it turns out, is the one that ran Mrs. Riggs off the road to her death, thinking he was killing Martin. Why we needed to write in more motivation for Riggs is beyond me, but that’s why I don’t make the Shane Black money.

Pieter takes off and his flunkies throw Riggs into the ocean, where he pulls a repeat of his straight-jacket escape. Down at the bottom of the pier, Riggs finds Rika, tied up and drowned.

His vengeance upon coming back to the surface is swift and fierce.

Back on the move, Riggs calls in to the station and gets Murtaugh on the line. He explains that the South Africans came after him, and that they killed both Rika and his wife. Murtaugh tries to explain that there’s more going on. Riggs makes clear that tonight is not about justice, it’s about vengeance. Oh, and we get 10 Riggs’ out of Roger in a 50 second span. Martin tells him he’s heading back to the stilt house. Roger tosses his badge in the desk, then follows after.

Down at the house in the Hills, we find Leo being tortured by Pieter and his men. After a quick discussion outside, Roger and Martin initiate a plan to go in and rescue Leo while getting some revenge against the South Africans.

Riggs has roped his truck around one of the house’s stilts and proceeds to pull the house off the hillside, as Murtaugh runs in, kills two more, and drags Leo outside.

After some quick reminiscing and a fateful “Give the little fellow a hug, you’ll be lucky if you see him again.”, Riggs and Murtaugh head off for the Alba Varden.

Down below the ship, they get out and investigate a container being guarded by three men. They drag the men off and no gunfire is shown, so I’m going to assume they just got “knocked out”. Inside the container, they realize they’re staring at a car and pallets full of plastic-wrapped stacks of US currency.

Amid a discussion about the ethics of Murtaugh pocketing a stack of thousand dollar bills, Rudd and his men close them up in the container and lift it to put it onboard the Varden.

Apparently they left the keys inside, as the detectives make an escape by throwing the car through the pallets of cash, the container’s door, and into the waters of the port. While the South Africans fire wildly after the car and what they think are our heroes, Murtaugh drops an “I’m too old for this shit” and they repel down from the midair container to the deck below, taking out two of the guards on the way down.

Martin eliminates four more guards down in the storage area, done with enough rolling and shooting to make Police Constable Danny Butterman gaze in awe.

In comes a knife! Riggs takes a dagger to the calf as Pieter emerges from the shadows and starts a series of kicks to Riggs. While upstairs Roger kills a guard, Riggs and Pieter go at it below, in some brutal hand to foot to knife combat, before Riggs overpowers his foe and knifes him in the guts. Then, a knife wound being too easy a way out, he hobbles over and drops the freight container on his head.

Roger, meanwhile, finds Riggs from the deck above, shouts for him, then dives for cover as Arjen starts firing at him with a thematically appropriate Luger.

After Murtaugh draws down on him, Arjen holds up his credentials, leading to this climactic moment:

Three more Riggs’s as Roger runs to his partner, a little Bob Dylan musical fake out with a soundtrack cue of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, then two more Riggs’s as Roger explains that Riggs isn’t allowed to die until he tells him to.

Riggs asks for his cigarettes, then asks Roger to throw them away, as “those things’ll kill ya” (a callback for our next adventure in Lethal Weapon 3), as we pull away to the credits.

Our scores!

And, with two datapoints to work with, some graphs!

Our overall Riggs! count is nearly quintupled, while Body Count is up slightly, I’m Too Old For This Shits are down considerably, and we have four times the Stooges references.

Murtaugh sees a more significant percentage of the body count here (including one via physics-defying surfboard decapitation.) while Riggs levels off slightly.

Join us next time for Lethal Weapon 3, where Joe Pesci returns with a truly 90’s blonde dye job, we’re introduced to Rene Russo as new series regular Lorna, and we tackle some internecine conflict within the LAPD and the gang violence epidemic.

Notes:

• 1
  Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon.
• 2
  Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering
• 3
  Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison.
• 4
  Covered in Episode 178: https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb
• 5
  Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope!

Part 1: Lethal Weapon (Original recipe)

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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!

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.