Glorious mullets, loose cannons, and sexualised daughters: how an undeniably influential classic maybe hasn’t dated so well.

Too Old For This Shit

Perhaps, like me, your introduction to the ‘buddy cop’ genre was via any one of the myriad parodies in the decades since Lethal Weapon was released:

Watching Lethal Weapon for the first time in 2024 is… bumpy. It’s novel to see certain buddy-cop tropes in their native habitat (“I’m getting too old for this shit”) and the sheer 1980s-ness of its violence and copaganda. It was a different time: police brutality as an heroic response to what they consider personal threats; police being cavalier about collateral and property damage; police shooting to kill in crowded civilian areas… oh wait.

Movie Star Power and My Wife’s Cooking

Mel Gibson as Riggs is an archetypical star of this era: a specifically showy style of performance, powered by Hollywood charisma and an accent from a place that does not exist. Danny Glover as Murtaugh is exactly the brand and flavour of ham of that era: he completely understands the movie he’s in, and his innate appeal transcends the less-flattering details of his character (for example, that the only thing he has to say to or about his homemaker wife is that her cooking sucks).

The elements in Lethal Weapon which bump most are found not in its aesthetics (such as the film’s uncredited third lead, Gibson’s scene-stealing mullet), nor even in its over-the-top performances, but in its over-the-top developments. The relationship between Riggs and Murtaugh, the escalation of stakes, the dialogue and character beats, and the darkness of the film’s themes (Riggs’ suicidal tendencies, American culture’s contempt for mental health, and the nation’s PTSD from the Korean and Vietnam wars): these all, from moment to moment, modulate at a rate and scale that can feel alternately erratic, jarring, or cartoonish.

Lethal Weapon is interesting as an early artefact of screenwriter Shane Black: not yet self-aware, the tone isn’t yet pitch-perfect, and the modulation hasn’t yet been refined; but the unpredictable narrative swings, and the messiness of the action, are present, clear, and wildly entertaining.

Then there’s the weird stuff.

Homoerotic And Not Subtle About It

I’m trying my best to avoid getting into a masochistic-homoerotic reading of the Riggs/Murtaugh dynamic. Like the way the film’s final act begins with them each being tortured while half-naked, in scenes where the film’s look is abandoned for framing and lighting more like 9 1/2 Weeks (1986). Or how the film climaxes with Riggs shirtless once again, in a bare-knuckle, knock-down brawl with bad guy Gary Busey, both of them drenched by an exploded, gushing fire hydrant, while Murtaugh hoarsely cheers Riggs on to “kill him” (where, given the moist mise-en-scène, one could imagine another verb other than “kill” being substituted). Or even that the final fight scene ends with both men shooting their load… ed guns, together, right at the audience, before collapsing into eachother’s arms, half-naked, spent. Nope, I shan’t be reading anything into any of that:

Sexualised Father and Daughter Stuff… No Really

There is, however, a whole other analysis to be written about the different ways Murtaugh’s teenage daughter, Riane (Tracy Wolfe), is sexualised throughout the film – particularly in relation to Murtaugh. From his verbal and visual responses to her burgeoning womanhood, and her flirting with the significantly older Riggs in front of him (the film really leaves no stone un-innueno’d)…

… to multiple scenes which see her body juxtaposed with her father’s, his half-denuded and dampened alternately by bath water or by torture sweat and blood. When the bad guys take his daughter, and not, say, his wife, as hostage to draw him out, Murtaugh threatens to kill them all, including her and himself, if they don’t release her (a fate worse than death?). I haven’t followed the discourse over the four decades since the film’s release, but people were across this, right?

Beyond Lethal

Lethal Weapon may be a classic, but it doesn’t hold up next to writer Shane Black‘s later films, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), The Nice Guys (2016), or (hot take?) Iron Man 3 (2013). Interestingly, two of those films also involve father figures and sexualised young daughters… anyways. In those more recent films, Black was also director, so it might be easy (and lazy) to suggest that Lethal Weapon‘s director, Richard Donner, is what made the difference here. But that wouldn’t be fair or true: Lethal Weapon both is of its time, and has undeniably and profoundly influenced so much beyond its time.

Further Viewing

Nerdwriter identifies the trademarks of Shane Black’s storytelling style throughout his filmography:

Until I finally get around to writing about The Nice Guys (2016), I’ll park these video essays, on how Shane Black’s style has developed and refined, here: