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Starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover. If there's one thing I learned from screening Lethal Weapon, it's that the next time I'm so coked to the gills that I have trouble standing under my own power, I'm going to have to make a mental note not to see if I can adequately balance myself on the railing of my 22nd floor apartment balcony. My guess is that, in my altered state, I will a) get married to a former Baywatch girl now co-hosting Singled Out, or b) as was the case with the character in Lethal Weapon's opening scene, the idea of attempting a forward triple somersault dive (with a degree of difficulty of 5.8) that would take me head first through the roof of the luxury sedan parked on the ground, might not seem like that bad of an idea.Starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, Lethal Weapon is the precursor of the three, box-office smash Lethal Weapon films. However, released in 1987, some eleven years prior to last summer's Lethal Weapon 4, this film is a surprisingly edgy, dark, and psychotic movie. Gibson's character, Martin Riggs, is on the brink of both insanity and self-destruction. While most people come home from work to relax on the sofa watching TV, Gibson comes home and puts a loaded gun in his mouth, debating about blowing off the back of his head with a hollow point bullet. This is quite a change of pace from the affable, tamer, saner character that we have become accustomed to in the third and fourth installments of this series. Writer Shane Black's creation of a truly disturbed and suicidal character in Riggs gives this movie a very off-putting feel of emotional instability (obviously) and psychological unbalancedness. This permeating sense of darkness, with Gibson not caring whether he lives or dies, sets Lethal Weapon apart from the other Bloody Christmas Action Flick, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and from the grand majority of formulaic action flicks Hollywood has produced in recent years. Watching Gibson kicking and hitting other people is fun to see, but when interspersed with scenes of Gibson walking around his trailer naked, crying, and telling the picture of his dead wife that he misses her, any guilt free entertainment the film previously had, is lost. Black's probe into the inner-workings of his main characters personal lives is very original, which is quite the opposite scenario his plot encounters. Glover is the stereotypical family man cop who, in the first ten minutes of this film, announces loudly that he is "too old for this stuff". Except Glover doesn't say 'stuff'. Glover is teamed with Gibson's anything but typical, totally psycho detective, who cares neither if he wakes up the next morning, or saves the Scottish Peasants from a horrible life of serfdom under the reign of terror of the British King, Edward the Hater of Homosexuals. Together Gibson and Glover investigate the death of the aforementioned character who died after completely a 22 story swan dive, who just happened to be the daughter of one of Glover's Vietnam buddies. The chemistry between Glover and Gibson is good--this, moreso than anything else is what has caused this series to be so successful--and Gibson's portrayal of a man over the edge, who guzzles Coors Light and Marlboros for breakfast is quite solid, but the tone of this film is so depressing that, despite the proliferation of well-planned and well-executed stunts and tremendous explosions, Lethal Weapon falls just behind Die Hard 2: Die Harder in the Battle of the Bloody Christmas Action Flicks. If you've got to see one of these movies, see Die Hard 2.
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