Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

It’s Just Been Reviewed

I made a post to Facebook today that got a certain phrase stuck in my head.  I had heard this phrase before on Kevin Smith’s Smodcast and on Family Guy.  I knew it was from a movie, and I knew which one, and I knew I owned it, but I’d never seen it.  I also wish I had the foresight to know that inspiration would hit me and I would want to watch this today so that I could review that one first.  I hate breaking continuity.  But I didn’t, so I’m just going to jump straight into the review of Lethal Weapon 2, written by Jeffrey Boam, directed by Richard Donner, and starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joss Ackland, Patsy Kensit, Joe Pesci, Derrick O’Connor, Traci Wolfe, Darlene Love, and Stephen Kahan.

Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) are back.  After a car chase, masked men break into Murtaugh’s house and deliver a warning to him and his wife (Darlene Love).  This causes their captain (Stephen Kahan) to take them off of the case they’re currently on and reassign them to protecting a federal witness and candidate for most annoying person ever, Leo Getz (Joe Pesci).  Someone tries to kill Leo (and who wouldn’t?).  Riggs and Murtaugh take Leo to find the base of operations for the people Leo is going to testify against and find that the attempted assassin is there.  They get the police down there and they shut the place down, until DeNomolos … I mean Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) comes downstairs and tells the police that he and his men are protected by diplomatic immunity, and it has not yet been revoked.  Riggs and Murtaugh leave empty handed, but at least Riggs meets Rudd’s cute secretary with such a bright future ahead of her, Rika Van Den Haas (Patsy Kensit).  Riggs and Murtaugh know that Rudd is up to something, so they do what investigating they can get away with while still still protecting Getz, and Murtaugh begins an extensive study into what it takes to revoke diplomatic immunity protection.

This is a pretty fun movie, but I feel like it doesn’t hold up that well in some ways.  I probably would’ve thought it was awesome if I had seen it 20 years ago, but today it takes a step down to “pretty fun”.  It’s nice that it jumps right into the action, opening with a big car chase.  It keeps up a pretty good amount of over-the-top action throughout as well.  One such thing was a Rube Goldberg-esque death midway through that involved hitting a car on the end of a tow truck driven by the enemy, it flying up over the car and colliding head on with an oncoming car, causing the surfboard on the front of that car to fly off and kill the driver of the tow truck.  The story itself was somewhat hit and miss, though.  It was interesting that they weren’t able to take on the main bad guy because he was protected by diplomatic immunity, but I feel like there are limits to how far you can push the whole diplomatic immunity thing, and DeNomolos passes those limits pretty early on and keeps going.  The love story for Riggs seemed a little awkwardly placed and unnecessary.  It gave Riggs a little motivation towards the end of the movie, but he also finds out that one of the bad guys was responsible for the death of his wife before the events of Lethal Weapon 1, and that would probably suffice for motivation to take down the bad guys.  Also, the fact that they’re really bad guys and Riggs and Murtaugh are good guys would probably suffice.  A lot of the lines are pretty cheesy action phrases, but they’re still pretty good.  The aforementioned (or at least afore-alluded-to) “Diplomatic Immunity”, “It’s just been revoked”, bang was pretty cheesy, but I like that line.  I do like it better when Peter Griffin uses it when it doesn’t make sense, but it’s still good here.  After Murtaugh kills two guys with a nail gun, topping it off with “nailed ’em both” was pretty classy as well.  The nail gun was part of a funny thing that occurred to me in the movie too.  They make a pretty big deal about a construction worker using a nail gun in Murtaugh’s house in the beginning, and later a big deal about the fact that Riggs can dislocate his shoulder to escape from straightjackets, and – SURPRISE!! – these two things come up again in the movie.  I don’t know why they feel the need to foreshadow these things.  We’ll believe they can do these things equally as much when they come up later, but they may also ruin the surprise.  I know how Murtaugh and Riggs are going to get out of these situations because my memory extends for roughly 2 hours, so I still remember when he did it earlier.

The cast performs exactly as they should in this movie: a little bit over the top, but still pretty good.  Mel Gibson didn’t seem nearly as crazy for most of this movie, probably having gotten soft from being happy spending so much time with Murtaugh’s family.  He does a couple of fairly wacky things, and generally has a nice quip to throw in a dangerous situation, but he doesn’t go nuts until the very end when he just finds out that they murdered his wife.  He comes out of the water and kills two dudes with extreme prejudice and really seemed like he’d lost it.  I don’t know why Mel Gibson is so good at acting insane, but he is.  I never found myself particularly interested in Danny Glover’s character in these movies, but they still give the man the best line in the movie.  He kind of annoys me because he spends most of his time talking about how he’s old and doesn’t think they should do the cool action things that Riggs wants to do.  He’s such a stick in the mud.  But speaking of annoying: Leo Getz!  You will quickly regret finding out how annoying Leo Getz.  Getz it?  Yeah, wasn’t funny in the movie either.  But he was a pretty pointless character that would not stop talking about stupid, uninteresting things.  His mouth was running every time he was on screen.  Joss Ackland was good.  He always comes off pretty intimidating, so I like him in a good villain role.  Patsy Kensit did a decent job in the movie, but I only really connected with her character once she got her tits out.  I felt like her character had no reason to be there, and when she’s gone, I didn’t really care.  They didn’t spend a lot of time building the relationship between her and Riggs (and the audience, technically).  She just met him, had dinner with him, then fucked him.  I wasn’t connected enough to care when she was gone.

Lethal Weapon 2 is a still a pretty fun movie that is just starting to show it’s age.  And not just because of Mel Gibson’s hair in it.  There’s a good deal of action, some of it pretty interesting and cool.  The story is decent, but not fantastic, but they sure did write some great one-liners.  I wish Mel Gibson had been more crazy throughout, as he was in the first movie, but at least he wasn’t as annoying as Joe Pesci’s character.  Also, there’s some decent titties.  I already owned this movie (because it came in a four pack with the other three movies), and I might have purchased the movie itself to keep up the collection, but I only would’ve purchased it because the first movie was so good.  It’s available for Netflix streaming, so I could recommend you check it out at least once.  Lethal Weapon 2 gets “In one ear, out the rubber” out of “They’ve been de-kaffir-nated”

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The Hunt for Red October (1990)

My Morse is so Rusty, I Could Be Sending Him Dimension on Playmate of the Month

Leave it to my friend Forty to actually request my review of a good movie.  One of the first, to my recollection.  In all honesty, I don’t really mind watching bad movies most of the time because I tend to find them amusing.  But, every once and a while, I should probably be asked to watch a good one so I don’t kill myself or simply die from From Justin to Kelly-related aneurisms.  Forty’s movie request was for a classic movie that – as with many classically awesome movies – had eluded me thus far, but it is a movie I wanted to see at some point.  And now I have.  I’m talking about The Hunt for Red October, based on a Tom Clancy novel, directed by John McTiernan, and starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Stellan Skarsgard, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Courtney B. Vance, Jeffrey Jones, and Fred Dalton Thompson.

Admiral James Greer (James Earl Jones) brings some pictures of a new fancy submarine to CIA operative Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin).  With the help of submarine expert Skip Tyler (Jeffrey Jones), they figure out that this picture is of a spankin’ new Typhoon-class submarine with a propulsion system called a “Caterpillar Drive” that makes sonar detection extremely difficult, allowing it the potential to get all up in America’s Kool-Aid without even knowing the flavor, and even boil that Kool-Aid with nuclear warheads.  This submarine is called the Red October.  At first, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wet themselves, but then Jack Ryan poses the possibility that the prestigious commander of the Red October, Marko Alexandrovich Ramius (Sean Connery), may want to defect.  The Joint Chiefs give Ryan 3 days to confirm Ramius’ intentions.  The Russians are after him to destroy him before the American’s get their new sub, the Americans are after him to stop him from possibly launching nukes at them, and Ryan’s after him to find out what he’s up to.  Thus begins the hunt for the Red October.

I feel like I’m one of the last people around to reach this conclusion but, here it goes: fuck this movie.  Just kidding, Forty!  This movie rules!  I haven’t always seen eye to eye with this Tom Clancy feller.  Some of his games got way more popular than I felt they warranted, and I’ve heard mixed reviews about some of his other movies, though I don’t know that I’ve seen any of them.  I had worried that, as is the case in some of his video games, I would think they were overrated.  But nay!  This is a good movie.  His story works really well, especially with how well-executed it is.  Most of the story of this movie is just about Ramius’ intentions, stretched into a little over 2 hours.  It’s not until around the last 20 minutes of the movie when you are actually sure of what his actual intentions are.  There are times when you’re sure he’s going to defect, other times when you know he wants to hijack the Red October and blow up America to start a war, and other parts where you have no idea.  And, seeing as the movie takes one idea and stretches it over 2 hours, you’d think it’d get really boring.  I don’t recall being bored at all in this movie.  From the start of the movie the tension builds as different groups get closer and closer to the Red October until the end where it just climaxes all over the audiences faces.  …EWWWWWWW!

There is quite the cast to this movie, as you may have gathered from the long list in the opening paragraph.  Alec Baldwin, still young and handsome, tore it up in this movie.  I never really believed Sean Connery’s accent was Russian, but he was a badass.  One of our first scenes with the guy shows him killing a fellow officer with extreme prejudice and the corner of a table.  He also had one of the best lines in the movie, involving how things react to bullets.  He had a smaller part in this, but I found myself watching Sam Neill more than anyone else in the movie for some reason.  He was a strong character that opened up to Ramius with some kind of sweet and innocent intentions about his new life in America if their defection works out.  I sure hope that works out for him.  I liked Courtney B. Vance as the really good sonar guy; like the action movie version of Harland Williams from Down Periscope.  Joss Ackland was pretty good as well, but I could not see him as anything but DeNomolos from Bill & Ted.  Though I’m usually excited to see him, I was extra excited to see Stellan Skarsgard in a good movie that came out long before I knew he existed, and he was also excellent, if under-used.  The entire cast was great, so I won’t waste more time just saying that.  Take actors name and add “was really good” to the end.

So there you go, Fortissimo.  Good story, great thrills, excellent tension, top notch performances.  This here is the recipe for a good movie.  You’ve probably already seen this movie, so I’m telling you that you should watch it again.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t yell at you because I just saw it myself, but now I’ve seen it so it’s only a matter of time before I’m allowed to yell at you for not watching a really good action-thriller.  The Hunt for Red October gets “Some things in here don’t react well to bullets” out of “And I will have a pickup truck”.

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!