9 / 10
Lethal Weapon is Richard Donner’s 1987 American action film about a suicidal Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective who’s partnered with a methodical family-man veteran for a Christmas-season drug investigation that turns into open warfare with a former Special Forces team running heroin.
Mel Gibson plays Martin Riggs. Danny Glover plays Roger Murtaugh. Gary Busey plays Mr. Joshua. Mitchell Ryan plays General Peter McAllister. Darlene Love plays Trish Murtaugh. Tom Atkins plays Michael Hunsaker. Shane Black wrote the screenplay, his first produced screenplay.
Warner Bros. released the film in March 1987 to major commercial success that set the buddy-cop action subgenre for the later two decades.
My buddy-cop list starts with Lethal Weapon, and nothing that copied it has come close. It’s violent, funny and sadder than it has any right to be, and the sadness is what makes it more than an action picture for me.
Shane Black’s screenplay structures Lethal Weapon as Christmas-set noir hidden inside an action film.
The season is everywhere: Murtaugh’s family preparing for the holiday, the Christmas-tree lot drug bust that opens the investigation, the elaborate lights at General McAllister’s home. It drives the themes, sharpening Riggs’s grief over his dead wife and foregrounding Murtaugh’s family stability, and the resolution depends on Riggs finally being let into a family Christmas. A film this loud that turns out to be secretly about a lonely man at the holidays is a clever trick.
Shane Black’s Christmas-Noir Structure
Black’s first produced screenplay built the Christmas-noir pattern that would become his career signature across Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Last Boy Scout, and Iron Man 3. Lethal Weapon’s Christmas integration is architectural: the season’s themes of family, loss, gratitude, and renewal run through every plot beat. Riggs’s eventual integration into Murtaugh’s family Christmas at the film’s close is the screenplay’s actual climax.
The Christmas-noir mode allows the screenplay to balance violent action with sustained emotional grounding. The audience cares about whether the characters survive because the holiday-family stakes have been established throughout the film. The technique is now standard in the buddy-action subgenre. Lethal Weapon built it.
For Writers
Christmas-season action films benefit from integration of seasonal themes into actual plot architecture instead of decorative-only setting. Black’s screenplay shows how holiday context can be emotional engine instead of as background.
Mel Gibson’s Riggs
Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs stands out among the action-film lead performances of the 1980s.
The character is suicidal, recently widowed, and operating at the edge of professional competence in ways that worry his colleagues. Gibson plays Riggs with committed instability instead of action-hero charisma. That gives the character the damaged quality that distinguishes Lethal Weapon from contemporary action productions.
The bathroom-suicide-attempt sequence is the film’s foundational character moment. Gibson plays Riggs’s attempt with full commitment to the character’s actual mental state, including the chambered round in the pistol, the decision-making physical hesitation, and the eventual retreat. The scene establishes that Riggs is dangerous to himself and consequently to anyone around him. That gives the surrounding action sequences their actual stakes.
The scene in the trailer, with Riggs and the gun, is the reason I rate this film as high as I do. Gibson lets it go on long enough to frighten me, and when Riggs pulls back, I’m not relieved, because the film has already convinced me he’ll try again.
For Writers
Action-film protagonists with real psychological damage produce stronger viewer identification than protagonists with surface-level professional struggles. Gibson’s Riggs is dangerous because his interior life is unstable instead of because his backstory says so.
Danny Glover’s Murtaugh
Glover plays Roger Murtaugh as the film’s necessary counterweight to Riggs’s instability. The character is a fifty-year-old detective approaching retirement, married with three children, methodical in his investigation work, and entirely uninterested in the high-energy approach that Riggs brings to their partnership. Glover plays the character’s exhausted competence with the particular dignity that the role requires.
Murtaugh’s ‘I’m too old for this shit’ refrain became a much-quoted line in 1980s action cinema, but in Glover’s performance the line is real exhausted complaint from a man who would prefer to be home with his family instead of chasing former Special Forces operatives through Los Angeles. The performance is more grounded than the line’s later ubiquity suggests.
Glover is the half of the partnership that gets too little credit, and I think he’s the reason the film works. Gibson gets the showy scenes, but Murtaugh’s family, Murtaugh’s home and Murtaugh’s weariness are what give Riggs a reason to live.
For Writers
Buddy-action pairings require committed individual characterization instead of complementary-template approach. Murtaugh works as Riggs’s counterweight because Glover plays the family-man tone with full conviction instead of only as setup for Gibson’s instability.
Craft Note
Richard Donner had directed Superman in 1978 and his action-film instincts were strong by 1987. The film’s set-pieces, especially the Christmas-tree-lot opening, the General’s-home assault sequence, the desert-torture interrogation, and the climactic Murtaugh-home-front-lawn fistfight, all show professional craft beyond the screenplay’s writing. Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen composed the score, with Clapton’s guitar contributions giving the film its distinctive sound signature. Three sequels followed: Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998). The franchise’s eventual decline didn’t diminish the original’s reputation.
Is Lethal Weapon as good as people say?
Donner’s film deserves its place as the buddy-cop film everything since has been measured against. Black’s screenplay, Gibson’s Riggs, Glover’s Murtaugh and Donner’s direction all pull the same way, and the damage at the center of Riggs gives the violence a weight the later sequels didn’t keep. It gets a 9 because it’s a hell of an action movie that turns out to be about grief. It’s good Christmas viewing for households comfortable with sustained action violence.
