Let's not pull any punches, here:
Lethal Weapon 4 is one of the worst action films Hollywood has ever unleashed on a summer audience.
Ever.
In fact, the movie is so awful that its principles — director Richard Donner, stars Danny Glover, Mel Gibson, Joe Pesci and Chris Rock, and screenwriter Channing Gibson and the three people who have story credit (three? It took three people to write this story?!) — should be ashamed of themselves, and agree to severe community service to compensate those of us who sat through their abomination on opening weekend. Cruel as it is, maybe we should lock them in a theater and force them to watch their own movie. Over. And over. And over again. Then maybe the world will be spared a fifth film in a series that never should have gotten past the second incarnation.
The story — oh come on, you know the story, already. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover play L.A. cops who, this time around, get involved in chasing down a gang of Chinese criminals who are smuggling immigrants into the US to exploit as slave labor. There are shoot-outs, explosions, car chases, fist fights, sadistic bad guys. Along the way, some likable innocent people who get killed, Mel's and Danny's loved ones are threatened with death, Danny's house gets burned to the ground, a car he borrows from a family member gets wrecked in a crash. For the first, oh, 100 minutes, Mel and Danny get their asses severely kicked by the mega-tough bad guy who's behind it all, before they kill him in a grotesque fashion. Yadda yadda yadda.
This time out, there's a family twist, as Danny's daughter (Traci Wolfe) and Mel's girlfriend (Renee Russo) are pregnant, and Mel has to decide if he's over the death of his first wife sufficiently to marry Renee, while Danny has to get used to the fact of becoming a grandfather. (The film tries to be clever and keep us guessing as to who the father of Danny's grandchild is, but, if you have a single brain cell, you'll figure it out in under three seconds.)
There are a lot of reasons this film fails so miserably but the principle one is that the script is plain atrocious. It's as if the multitudes who worked on it had no idea how to fill the two hours. Sure, they knew that, roughly every ten minutes something BIG had to happen — a shooting, an explosion, a sadistic strangulation murder. Beyond that, the script seems mere filler to take up the time between those moments. There is, for example, a long and unfunny exchange between Pesci and Rock, about the problem with cell phones; in another scene, in which Pesci, Gibson and Glover are on a boat, Pesci launches into a rant about the absurdity of nautical terms, like "aft" and "stern." (In Pesci's most famous scene from his Oscar-winning performance in GoodFellas, he asks Ray Liotta, over and over. "You're saying I'm funny. I make you laugh, is that it?" No, Joe, not in this flick.")
More importantly, however, the scriptwriters clearly had no notion of how to move the story forward in a significant way. They showed no understanding of pacing or suspense. Throughout the film, for example, characters just reveal information willy-nilly, with no build-up or tension. At the opening, for example, Danny and Mel, are cornered by a mad gunman who's spraying an L.A. street with bullets and a flame-thrower. Crouched behind a car, Danny tells Mel, that, oh by the way, he wasn't supposed to tell him this, but his girlfriend's pregnant. Mel counters, by telling Danny, well, yeah, I wasn't supposed to tell you this, but your daughter's pregnant. Later on, Russo reveals that Internal Affairs is looking into a report that Danny's on the take. Sure enough, he does seem to have an awful lot of cash but when Mel finally asks Danny about it, there's a simple explanation: End of mystery, just like that. The problem with movies in which characters don't have to work hard to solve riddles, is that the audience doesn't have to work hard, either, and the film just becomes capital "B" boring.
To be fair, however, there was one good moment in the movie.
During the screening, in the middle of yet another dull chase scene, the projector malfunctioned and abruptly shut off, and for a full three minutes, sitting in the semi-dark of the theater while the slide chain went through its round of soda and snack promotions, there was at least something interesting happening.
by Joe Schuster
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