Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

Please Leave A Comment Below & Join Our Mailing List

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

6/10

 

Starring

Mel Gibson

Danny Glover

Rene Russo

Chris Rock

Joe Pesci

Directed by Richard Donner

This movie is more of comedy than it is action, and the makers went overboard with the comic aspect of the movie introducing Chris Rock to add more to the job that Joe Pesci already had a hand on. This will not stand as one of the best in all the series partly due to the fact that the plot here is a little lazy than the ones we saw in Lethal Weapon 1 and Lethal Weapon 2. Lethal Weapon 3 may have had the best intro scene but it too was just lazy in the aspect of its script, as it was more like let’s get a girl for Riggs than it was let’s make a buddy cop movie.

Here the duo are up against the Kung Fu fighting Jet Li, his introduction added the Kung Fu genre in to this action comedy and Richard Donner the director just didn’t have what it took to make this Lethal Weapon a master piece, but if this movie is to stand on its own it is a nice action comedy.

Again the score is done by the trio of Michael Kamen, Eric Clapton & David Sanborn, although here the whole hip addition didn’t make me enjoy the score as I did in the previous movies.

In this flick our buddy cop duo is up against the Chinese Triads. Riggs, Murtaugh and Leo were fishing when they came across a smuggling ship, and as usual by accident they ended up crashing the ship.

Now they are cut between human trafficking and the murder of three people on the ship. The Triads are in America with Jet Li as Wah Sing Ku being in charge of the operations, Riggs and Murtaugh are trying hard to be able to piece together what the Triads are up to, and the connection between their operations and the human smuggling.

But as this was going on both Riggs and Murtaugh are expecting. Riggs girlfriend Lorna is pregnant with their first child and Murtaugh eldest daughter Rianne is pregnant with hers. Roger however doesn’t know who Rianne’s baby daddy is, but Riggs knows that it is Detective Lee Butters (Chris Rock) and he uses this to play tricks on Roger making him think Butters is gay.

I do commend the producers in their ability to maintain the cast, right from the first to the forth The Murtaugh family of Husband, Wife and three kids have been the same cast from the first to the last. Riggs and his new found love Lorna from the third was also here in this last one, the captain has been the same all through the series, and Leo Getz that was introduced in the second was also maintained although the series.

What can I say, I did enjoy watching the crazy duo again for the fourth time, and the DVD box set of all four movies is one you will like to own.

Plans are there for a reboot or continuation of the Lethal Weapon franchise, I just hope they won’t blow it.