Review of Lethal Weapon (1987) by Xgary X — 30 Nov 2011

A veteran detective is paired up with a burnt out cop with a death wish when investigating the murder of the daughter of one of his old Vietnam war buddies. Lethal Weapon was probably the film that perfected the Hollywood buddy cop formula and is yet another example of the macho excesses of the 1980s.

All mullets, machine guns, drug abuse, explosions and gratuitous nudity while the wise cracking super cops get bare chested and find one excuse after another to blast, bludgeon and brutalise bad guys so irredeemably evil you don't have to worry about anything so trite as their civil rights (or right to stay breathing for that matter!) It was popular enough to warrant three sequels and endures still, mainly because of the winning chemistry between Danny Glover's dismayed old timer and Gibson's comedy manic depressive but the plot is paper thin as well as highly unbelievable and it's really just an excuse to run around with guns and blow stuff up.

We've all heard of the chick flick, well Lethal Weapon is one of the archetypal dick flicks. Silly, dumb and soaked in testosterone, it's a film perfectly engineered to appeal to the adolescent boy locked inside every XY chromosome.