Lethal Weapon
Wait a second, this is the opening scene? Recreating The Most Beautiful Suicide of Evelyn McHale on the Empire State Building? I thought this was a comedy, not Crash during Christmas!
Hell, just a few minutes later, after Riggs does his big bust, he very nearly kills himself in his dumpy trailer. And they save another dude from jumping off a building too, there are just way too many suicide references here, what the hell.
The protagonists are very strong. Riggs’s suicidal tendencies only manifested since his wife die in a car crash a couple months ago. Murtaugh is a family man, just hitting 50, with a large family to take care of. Riggs is a crack shot, but he’s just bonkers. Murtaugh likes to keep it simple.
Not that the plot itself is less dark. A kind of A-Team of renegade soldiers of fortune uses their connections to import very large amounts of heroin into the US. They launder the proceeds through a bank, and when that banker tries to talk, his daughter is murdered.
The banker’s daughter was actually a porn artiste and prostitute. The bad guys know where the protagonist lives, and kidnap his daughter too. The torture would include raping her in front of her father.
Riggs was also Delta Force, Air America was explicitly mention, and the bad guys even have a expy Nguyễn Ngọc Loan they brought in, for the worst physical tortures. You wouldn’t want things to get dreary at the court martial.
It’s up to our protagonists to bust this international crime syndicate led by Delta Force dudes. No biggie.
The title comes from the fact that Riggs is also a martial arts expert, Murtaugh jokes he needs to register as a lethal weapon. This is actually foreshadowing to the finale, a grounded version of Cyborg.
Murtaugh seems like a conservative family man, but has a giant anti-apartheid bumper sticker on his fridge. Maybe it’s his wife that put it there, she can’t even cook properly, how feminist of her. There’s also a scene where he tries and fails to rap, future father of Childish Gambino.
As for Riggs, he laughs his ass of when the kids are talking amongst themselves, not talking to the cops, they will arrest you, the cops always shoot black people. The rot was deeply repressed, it seems
Shane Black loves the pornos, see The Nice Guys and even Burn Hollywood Burn, but that other plot was nicked from Hardcore. He also loves that particular bridge in LA, reused in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for example. This is only classified as a “comedy” due to the very strong banter between the leads, might have been amped up in the sequels. This is not funny.
This was actually directed by Richard Donner, of OG Superman fame. Looking forward to Loaded Weapon…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.