1998 in Review: "Lethal Weapon 4"
The definition of a guilty pleasure
Riggs, Murtaugh, always you wrestle inside me.
The Lethal Weapon series is a guilty pleasure for me, not because there’s anything wrong or even unserious about action movies. Somewhere between Bruce Lee and John Wick, most cinephiles got the message that action is art. The problem with the Lethal Weapon series is that its appeal rests on the thrill of watching police officers behave very badly and get rewarded for it. To achieve justice, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) circumvent police procedure, search warrants, Miranda rights, and even arrest. Instead, they punch, kick, break stuff for fun, and kill bad guys because it’s easier than arresting them and letting them stand trial.
Watching these films in the ‘80s and even the ‘90s, it surely would have been easy to see them as the good guys. It was the action movie era, and most of them were about cops. Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all specialized in it. Of course the cops in these movies don’t simply arrest the bad guys and turn them over to the justice system. What kind of movie would that be? But Lethal Weapon is different for two reasons. 1) It centered on the Los Angeles Police Department, which came under intense and increasing scrutiny over the life of the franchise for its brutality and corruption, and 2) the Lethal Weapon films situate this extrajudicial activity in the context of a heartwarming and surprisingly tender story about families, original and chosen.
It’s what’s known in progressive circles today as “copaganda” for how it promotes police officers as heroes, even when they’re behaving in ways that are ethically suspect. What makes Lethal Weapon particularly pernicious is how damn likable these characters are. Over the course of the first film, Riggs transforms from a suicidal loner to an adopted member of the Murtaugh clan, and the scenes that play out at their home have the tenor of a sitcom. For many white audiences, the Murtaughs were the most likable Black family outside of the Huxtables. Murtaugh has three beautiful kids, a nice house in the suburbs, and a wife that looks like Darlene Love (wait, that is Darlene Love!). The juxtaposition between the Rockwellian family scenes and high-level action implies that Riggs and Murtaugh are keeping inner city violence out of the suburbs, a major reactionary talking point in the 1980s. This point is further driven home when the Murtaugh family becomes the literal target of the bad guys. This happens in almost every film.
The Lethal Weapon films could be like any other regressive action franchise of its day, like Die Hard or Running Scared or Tango and Cash. What’s weird is that director Richard Donner, a noted Hollywood liberal, works overtime to undercut the reactionary foundation with surface-level progressive politics. The bad guy in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) is a South African criminal, an unabashed racist who uses his diplomatic immunity to get away with a complex laundering operation. At one point, Murtaugh and his weaselly sidekick Leo (Joe Pesci) make a scene at the South African embassy as a distraction so Riggs can sneak upstairs and hunt for evidence, and they do so by posing as protestors and shouting about the “white minority regime.” It may be a trick, but when Glover shouts, “Free South Africa, you dumb sonofabitch,” it really feels like he means it.
Lethal Weapon 3 is more of a mixed bag. The villain there is an ex-cop known for his brutality who uses his knowledge of police procedure to steal automatic weapons and sell them to gangbangers. It feels like a nod to the politics of its time, when the LAPD’s reputation was reeling after the Rodney King trial. It doesn’t totally work, in part because the villain just isn’t that scary but also because the villain seems only marginally more out of line than the heroes.
Which brings us to Lethal Weapon 4, the most confused film in the series, but still a damned enjoyable movie. In this one, which was released five years after the third installment (the longest break in the franchise), Riggs is finally catching up to Murtaugh in the family department. He’s got a pregnant girlfriend played by Rene Russo, and he’s even considering marrying her. Meanwhile, Murtaugh’s family is somehow getting larger. After he and Riggs disrupt a shipment of Chinese families being trafficked to America, Murtaugh takes one of them into his home with (I guess) a plan to help them get on their feet as undocumented immigrants in America.
It’s all very similar to the way the politics of apartheid were inserted into Lethal Weapon 2. When the victims are discovered in the belly of a ship, Riggs and Murtaugh have a little spat with another cop who complains about the paperwork. “Whatever happened to ‘Bring us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free’?” asks Murtaugh in a slight misquote. “Now,” the cop replies callously, “it reads No Vacancies.” Murtaugh snarls back, “I guess your parents were Native Americans.” It’s a nice exchange that paints Riggs and Murtaugh as “the good ones” in the department, but the rest of the film largely ignores the politics of human trafficking and immigration to do battle with Chinese gangsters. Nevertheless, Donner puts a little liberal seasoning into the sauce, perhaps out of guilt for creating and perpetuating a thoroughly reactionary franchise.
The same explanation goes for the sign prominently displayed in the police station that says something like “Handguns kill children,” with an NRA logo and a big red slash mark running through it. I’m sure Donner had the best intentions here, but one measly sign does not make up for a franchise that fetishes guns and shooting as if it’s a kink.
It kinda is. One reason I keep coming back to this franchise, despite is ugly politics, is the love between Riggs and Murtaugh. Yes, love. Not friendship. Not affection. Love. In the second film, Murtaugh tells Riggs he loves him without words while sitting on a toilet with a bomb strapped to it. It’s an emotionally and physically intimate scene that starts with Roger with his pants around his ankles and ends with the two partners wrapped around each other in the bathtub (to survive the blast, mind you). In the third movie, they say the L-word to each other outright. You just didn’t hear men talk about their feelings in action movies at that time (and certainly not in this time, Vin Diesel and Tom Cruise). There’s also a lot of grief talk in Lethal Weapon; Riggs talking about his dead wife, Murtaugh feeling guilt over the shooting of a teenage criminal; even Leo mourning his childhood pet, a frog named Froggy. In a scene in the fourth film, Murtaugh asks Riggs why he’s not ready to get married to his pregnant girlfriend, and Riggs speaks openly and honestly about having unresolved issues about the death of his first wife. It makes me wish I could talk to my friends like that.
And yet Lethal Weapon 4 lacks the courage of its tender convictions by being the most homophobic installment in the franchise by far. Look, it’s always been there. There were a couple jokes in the first few films, but it comes to full bloom in a particular subplot in 4. Riggs finds out that Murtaugh’s daughter is engaged to Lee Butters (a competent Chris Rock), a young cop in the department, and Murtaugh doesn’t know yet. So Riggs messes with his partner and encourages him to view Lee’s interest in him as romantic. This leads to a lot of laughs at the expense of the idea of a man being attracted to another man. Throw in an early scene where Murtaugh, clad only in his heart print boxers, rejects sympathetic arm around the shoulder from Riggs because he’s afraid of being touched while he’s half-naked, and an unnecessarily homophobic slur from Riggs to a Chinese villain (“Enter the drag queen”), and Lethal Weapon 4 is actually the most intolerant film in the franchise.
And yet. There’s always an “and yet” with this franchise. The fact is it’s still bloody marvelous, to quote Uncle Benny (Kim Chan). The misunderstanding with Butters is classic sitcom stuff—Three’s Company comes to mind—but it’s still a hoot, especially with Riggs giggling in the background the whole time. The chemistry between Riggs and Murtaugh has aged like honey, or like actors on the fourth season of a sitcom who know each other’s instincts as well as their own. Their comfort level pays dividends as the film shoehorns jokes and plot resolutions into action scenes.
The fourth installment also features the best villain in the franchise. Jet Li, a major martial arts star in China who was just embarking on his American film career, is a formidable opponent for the aging Gibson and Glover. He moves with a speed, strength, and dexterity that would seem incredible next to any American action star, and superhuman across from two middle-aged guys. Their final showdown, in which Riggs and Murtaugh stupidly decide to take him on for no reason except this is a Lethal Weapon movie and that means they have to kill someone rather than arrest them, carries with it genuine stakes. For the first time, you actually can’t imagine a way that they win.
Spoiler alert: They do. In these films, the cops always win. They cheat, they bully, they break stuff, they shove their guns in people’s faces, and in the end, we’re supposed to love them for it. The magic of these films is that we do: easily, willingly, and adoringly.
