1989 Rewind: Lethal Weapon 2

I planned to start my 1989 retrospective with something perhaps a bit more artistic, but screw it, I was on a roll. Lethal Weapon was the kind of hit that would undoubtedly get a sequel, which must have sent chills running down the spines of geeks back in the late '80s. After all, those were the halcyon days of blowing crap up, but it all fell apart in the sequels. Rambo, Predator, Temple of Doom, they were all major letdowns (Aliens is exempt, as nearly a decade passed between sequels and the original was a horror film, not an action extravaganza).

It is therefore a total shock that Lethal Weapon 2, the follow-up to a film with some of least attention to the plot of any action film in the '80s -- and Lord is that saying something -- is every bit as good as the original. This is all the more impressive when you consider that this film actually has themes it wants to address, which easily could have spelled doom for a franchise built upon the line "I'm too old for this shit."

The first thing that caught my eye when I watched this film for the first time was its acknowledgment of past events. I would expect Murtaugh's house to be completely rebuilt following the events of the previous film, and indeed for any concrete details of that film to be forgotten period. But, sure enough, Murtaugh must cope with the arduous repair process as well as the loss of police car.

Initially, plot doesn't even enter in the frame. Donner and writer Jeffrey Boam, working from Shane Black's story, know that people tuned in to see Gibson and Glover do their thing, and the first 10-15 minutes involve them chasing low-ranking bad guys and trading barbs. There's a particularly funny bit involving Roger's daughter starring in a condom commercial, which the entire department watches thanks to Riggs' big mouth.

Eventually, though, we meet our baddies. As with the last batch, they're drug runners, but with a new twist: they're also South African diplomats and thus immune to any investigations. To be honest, the film's chief flaw is its loose grasp on diplomatic immunity, as these guys seem to think that they are immune no matter what they do. Their South African background opens up a racial subplot on account of the tension over apartheid, but thankfully it never gets in the way. Mainly, it serves to set up one-liners for Roger.

Aiding Martin and Roger's quest to break these villains is Leo Getz, an accountant and money launderer for the diplomats. Joe Pesci, normally the intimidating, thuggish wee-man, instead plays Leo as a total incompetent, a babbling fool with a gift for numbers but not human interaction. He so thoroughly annoys his protectors you think they might just turn him over to the South Africans to stop the noise. Pesci nearly steals the show as the manic Getz, with his shrill rants on minutiae and his constant use of the word "OK."

Having a plot could have dangerously distracted us from all the fun that made the original so great, but Donner makes good use of his bigger budget with some jaw-dropping stunts, including a brief but thrilling car chase and two all-out assaults on the South Africans. There are Bond-esque one-liners thrown in for good measure, but the characters know how ridiculous those things are.

Lethal Weapon 2 does not benefit from its extended cut as its predecessor does, but I can't find an area where it hurts it, either. Everything about it is bigger and badder, but it also has a narrative as compelling as its characters this time around. Some of the lines addressing apartheid and the juxtaposition between evil South Africans and tolerant American cops -- in the LAPD, no less -- are too simplistic, but it's all worth it for a line as deliriously cheesy as "They've been de-kaffirnated." It may not be high art, but Lethal Weapon 2 is one of the most worthy sequels ever made, and something you should always keep handy for a rainy day.

Lethal Weapon

I'm not saying anything revelatory when I say that the '80s had the best action movies, but I'm reminded every time I pop one in. Those were the days, when men (and women: see Aliens) could blow up everything in sight just because. Action films with actual themes -- Aliens...uh, did I mention Aliens? -- were few and far between, while the rest were just magnificent effects reels. Certainly among the cream of the crop is Lethal Weapon, Richard Donner's buddy cop film to end all buddy cop films.

Lethal Weapon is a thing of beauty, one that owes its success to placing everything on the rapport between Danny Glover's safe, experienced veteran Roger Murtaugh and Mel Gibson's insane, Special Forces-trained upstart Martin Riggs. Obviously, buddy cops live and die by the buddy pairings, but usually they're so generic that it's hard to care either way about them. But Riggs and Murtaugh stand as possibly the greatest buddy cops in the history of the subgenre. It inverts the tired, racially unsettling pair of the reserved white cop and a shrill, wise-cracking, young black man, and the result is classic.

Murtaugh is celebrating his 50th birthday at the start of the film; his children playfully tease his graying beard and he laughs it off, only to shave the beard before reporting for duty. As the old men in these films invariably must, he needs a new partner, and now he's reluctantly paired with Riggs. Riggs, of course, is the polar opposite: suicidal since his wife's death, we meet him -- in Donner's director's cut -- facing down a sniper picking off children in a schoolyard. Riggs marches deranged into the field of fire, stands his ground as bullets fly around him, then he aims and takes his shot. Someone tosses out the mandatory, "You're crazy, but dammit you're good."

The plot is about as simple as they come: the daughter of an old family friend turns up dead, so Roger pledges to find her killer. As he and Riggs trace the clues, they uncover a massive heroin smuggling operation. The smugglers are led by a retired General McAllister (Mitchell Ryan) and his top henchman Mr. Joshua. Also a member of an elite Special Ops team, Joshua is utterly insane, though that might simply be a byproduct of being portrayed by Gary Busey.

The fights with these two criminal leaders are epic, and they produce magnificent one-liners. The film doesn't have much in the way of character arcs outside of stabilizing the depressed Riggs, but the scene where Joshua and a thug torture Riggs offers a downright chilling (and thrilling) moment when Riggs stops screaming long enough to tell the two that he's going to kill them. Say what you will about Gibson, but he has the charisma and the chops to pull off every aspect of this role, from the Three Stooges-loving loon to the morose depressive to the fearsome ex-soldier. Lines like "I'm too old for this shit" are tried and true classics, and the final showdown in the rain is textbook '80s.

There's really not too much to say about this film. You don't need to check your brain at the door to buy the story, but you also don't need to use it as Riggs runs barefoot down a street with a machine gun chasing a speeding car, nor do you need one when Busey is burning his hand for absolutely no reason. The editing is just a bit much at times, but Donner knows how to keep things interesting. His director's cut is one of the better extended cuts around, adding some wonderful character touches such as the aforementioned school shootout and a scene where Riggs hires a prostitute simply to watch TV with him without losing an ounce of momentum.


Too many films these days try to shoehorn themes into the explosions -- which is not to be frowned upon, but it's rarely done well -- or run in the opposite direction and stretch things miles beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief. Lethal Weapon is a reminder fun can be good and dumb without being developmentally challenged.

Apocalypto

I generally pride myself on an ability to separate the art from the artist. After all, I'm not going to stop watching Chinatown, far and away the greatest neo-noir film of all time, because of Roman Polanski's...personal problems. But I admit, this is now. 2006 was then. I was barely 17, and Mel Gibson went from being the guy who tortured Jesus for two hours to the most hated man in Hollywood. I missed his Apocalypto because A)I hated that other ancient film of Mel's and B)he was absolutely loony.

Finally, over two years later, I sat down with Mel Gibson's post-scandal epic, caring less about his personal life and more about the possibility for a disaster. I mean, a film about how the Maya were savages who deserved what they got? On top of the firestorm of Gibson's anti-Semitic self-defeat at the time? There's schadenfreude and there's schadenfreude, but they don't even have a term for this. So I grabbed some popcorn and plopped down to watch the last flames lick up a once-great career.

So imagine my surprise, then, when I got a good film. Hell, for what it is, it's pretty great. The Passion of the Christ, for all its flaws--and God, what a bad film it was--showcased Gibson's incredible skill as a visual filmmaker. His vision of Christ's time was possibly the most detailed ever made, and he brings that same technical care to this film. The jungles tower overhead and their roots spill out over the ground, yet somehow you get a sense of the place as the tribesmen run through the endless foliage with an exact sense of direction. When we stumble into the Mayan city, Gibson brings ancient ruins to life the same way Ridley Scott digitally renovated the Colosseum in Gladiator.

Gladiator serves as a good comparison because, like that film, Apocalypto is an action romp. No more, no less. Don't get caught up in the epic feel and that nagging sense that you should be learning something: this is a chase thriller. Our hero, Jaguar Paw, lives in a small village deep in the middle of the jungle. One day, he and members of his hunting party encounter a group of refugees who ask to pass through the tribe's land. They speak of a vicious people who burned their huts and enslaved those they didn't kill. Sometime later, these warriors invade Jaguar Paw's tribe and take him back to their city.

Our hero finds himself at the top of a Mayan temple, prepped for human sacrifice. Some stuff happens, he escapes, now he has to invade some seriously cheesed-off warriors. Now, this structure received some heat from Traci Arden, an associate professor of anthropology and an expert on Mayan culture. Her article "Is Apocalypto Pornography?" condemns Gibson for promoting "Maya on Maya violence" even though she acknowledges the civilization's brutal side. Nevertheless, she slams the filmmaker for not showing the scientific and artistic advances of the Mayan culture.

This is obviously a very smart person, but I wonder if she did not take leave of her senses while watching this. As I've said, this is just an action movie. It's also set on the precipice of the fall of the Maya. Of course we're not going to look at breakthroughs in a two hour movie: that's a slideshow, not entertainment. Furthermore, and this surprised me, Gibson doesn't exploit his indigenous actors or his background at all. Most films introduce tribes and such not so much to mock them but to place everything behind a glass case, to say "Oooooh, lookit! They almost look like us!" Gibson does no such thing; he treats the culture with a respect and at no point calls attention to his actors to pat himself on the back for going outside of Hollywood or England to find actors.

If there's a message in any of this, it's that Jaguar Paw's tiny village showcases more humanity than governments. The Spanish arrive at the end, and we know what it will mean for the Maya, but Gibson says that this is merely the continuation of the cycle of conquerors. The Maya subjugated various tribes and wound up with some monumental social and scientific advancements, and the Spanish bring with them disease and the same zealotry of the Mayan priests, but they too carry with them technological breakthroughs. At its core, Gibson's message is the same ideal Pvt. Witt believed in The Thin Red Line, albeit Malick at least shed the naïvete of this notion by showing the violence even within these small communities. Nevertheless, while Apocalypto is much simpler than some of its fans would give it credit for, it's a tightly structure, absolutely beautiful looking thrill ride. I can't stress that last part enough; if you see this film for no other reason, see it because it's one of the five most gorgeous films made in the decade.