Lethal Weapon 2
The one with the Afrikaans bad guys, where Mel Gibson does a mock Nazi salute and calls them “Aryan” and “Adolf”. How ironic.
This is more light hearted than the last time, it setups a formula with some required elements: a crazy action cold open, several scenes where the protagonist scream a lot at one another, other where they bond, and MOAR action, more shit blowing up, MORE MORE MORE! Of course Donald Trump is mentioned by name, when they see pallets of cash.
Evil Boer dudes are smuggling drugs into the US, paying in Krugerrands, or something like that. I’m assuming they are Boer, they all have Dutch names and talk in a kind of glossolalia they call Afrikaans. The twist is that they are all bona fide embassy staff, they have diplomatic passports and everything. The diplomatic immunity shtick is pushed very far, they are shooting at cops with automatics in the middle of the street and flying helicopters in downtown LA!
Since the evil guys are official representatives of a foreign state and the police chief knows his loose cannons, he gives him another side job: protecting a money launderer for a couple days. The problem is that they don’t give a shit and take him with them on their investigation while he rants and rants about all kinds of shit, with that Joe Pesci voice from Goodfellas. The two plots never come back at the end even, he’s just some comic relief, not that it’s needed.
All the guys are evil racist dickheads, but one meek girl is only shuffling papers there because she wants to live in LA. She actually hates her boss, not for any political opinions, but because the writers made him a lecherous old man too, besides going around calling black police officers “kaffer” to their faces.
There’s also some lore deepening, turns out Riggs’ wife was killed in an “accident” that was an attempt on his life! They also murder this new pencil pusher. These Afrikaner creeps!
She is nice to Riggs, so he literally “forces” himself to her and they fuck around in his trailer for hours and hours on end, those puffy nipples must be chaffed by the end. For symbolic reasons, she should have been fucking the black guy, but that would be beyond the pale. Even in the condom commercial, blacks only kiss blacks, equality in difference.
Yeah, that is an hilarious subplot. Murtaugh’s daughter is doing a commercial that will air on prime time TV, the whole family gets together to see it, and it’s a condom commercial. His face is priceless, his pals at work make him a condom tree and all. Even the wise guy thinks his daughter is hot.
There are now a big team of cops in their team (including Vasquez and other dude from Aliens, and whatshisface from Total Recall), but almost all die in some explosions.
In hindsight, Riggs being so anti-racism rings hollow. Murtaugh does a big rant in the embassy, using the f-word (fascist), he is really pissed about apartheid. Hell, the Triangle Trade is mentioned by name too.
Mandela was still in jail, but he is not mentioned, maybe he was still considered a terrorist, ANC would be like Hamas.
South Africa still has the orange and blue flag, so Executive Outcomes did not exist yet, these are legitimate agents of the state, not mercs. This is all going on while the Reagan government is using Iran-Contra money to finance Jonas Savimbi for his alliance with South Africa to invade Angola, right?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.