LETHAL WEAPON 4 A film review by Andrew Hicks Copyright 1998 Andrew Hicks
(1998) **1/2 (out of four)
I don't know if there's ever been any fourth installment of a movie series that's been truly worth watching (um, BATMAN AND ROBIN?), and from the beginning it's obvious that LETHAL WEAPON 4 won't improve upon its predecessors. It's a disappointment, too, because the first three movies in the series were good, sometimes great action comedies. This one only reinforces the theory that two decent sequels is all anyone can hope for, which doesn't bode well for the DIE HARD 4 that will no doubt be forced upon us in the years to come.
That's not to say LETHAL WEAPON 4 isn't fun at times. Watching cops Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in action again, even if they're starting to look a little old for this kind of movie, is like hanging out with old friends after a long absence. It's good to see them again, but things aren't the way they were.
In essence, this movie is little more than a reunion of LETHAL WEAPON characters. There's the loudmouth accountant-turned-P.I. (Joe Pesci) and the sexy karate chick (Rene Russo, also well into her forties now), and the familiar Murtaugh family. The movie ends in a series of nostalgic photo album shots from this and earlier LETHAL WEAPON movies, so at least it knows the main thing going for it is the familiarity of moviegoers.
About the only thing new in LETHAL WEAPON 4 is Chris Rock, as Chris Rock. He plays Butters, a detective secretly married to Murtaugh's daughter. A lot of the movie's comic relief scenes revolve around Butters kissing up to his unknowing father-in-law, who thinks he's coming on to him. So there's that inevitable sitcom standby, where one person's confession is completely misinterpreted by the other person, leaving a knowing audience to chuckle. It goes back to the "I Love Lucy" days, and is about as recycled as Pesci's "they f*ck you with the cell phone" speech.
Some of it is funny, though. I forgave some of the reused elements just because I loved the characters, which I think was the filmmakers' aim. And the movie is still pretty good because the action is more or less original. The traditional Opening Scene That Has Nothing To Do With The Plot has a psycho with a flamethrower and a machine gun out on a city street, torching and shooting everything in sight. The difference with part four is that the two leads don't seem to take any of the unrealistic action seriously, which spoils any illusion of danger. The solution to the torch guy is to have Murtaugh undress and flap his arms like a chicken to distract the guy, which may actually be too silly for a Leslie Nielson movie.
The rest of the plot isn't much more serious. There's the FATHER OF THE BRIDE II gimmick of dual pregnancies, this time with Murtaugh's daughter ("Pleasee let the father be black") and Russo, still shacked up with Gibson but without marriage on the mind. The morals of these action movie heroes, I tell you... The crime side of things involves some Chinese gangsters (headed by badass fighter Jet Li, whose maiden name was Ski) who are smuggling illegal aliens in at $35,000 a head and are printing up some counterfeit money to buy the criminal Four Fathers. Or something like that; forgive me for not having a press kit to explain all these convoluted plots to me.
Rest assured any pause for dialogue is just a momentary lull of action. And since LETHAL WEAPON 4's strong suit is its action, it's a good thing there's plenty of it. Like I said, the characters don't take it seriously, so there's no chance we will. Everyone's a lot more glib here than in the other movies in the series, and that's usually not a good thing. Think of how smug everyone was in HUDSON HAWK and you can imagine how good a LETHAL WEAPON 5 would probably be.
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