“We Bury the Funsters” – Lethal Weapon Revisited

With Christmas fast approaching, a familiar debate will resume in homes, offices and their Zoom equivalents as to what constitutes a legitimate Christmas movie. Much of the banter will centre on Die Hard as the preeminent example of an action movie which has legitimately crossed into the holiday season category. Some may even cite it as the film which kick-started the whole sub-genre.

Nobody could deny Die Hard’s success in this department or its undoubted brilliance as an action film but the honour of first Christmas action movie belongs to another.

A full year before Lieutenant John McClane dragged himself resignedly into that ventilator shaft in Nakatomi Plaza, Lethal Weapon exploded onto our screens in a hail of automatic gunfire, launching the concept of the Christmas action movie, while also providing the template for the modern video game (waves of anonymous baddies dispatched prior to a showdown with the end-level boss).

This is the film which cemented the use of the 9mm as the weapon du jour for all self-respecting action heroes. In one audacious set-piece, the character Riggs pours bullets from his 9mm Beretta into a disappearing helicopter containing an enemy sniper; a scene which no anachronistically-red-blooded male can fail to mentally re-enact while awaiting his photo call in the white-pillared, lavishly-terraced hotel garden of a friend’s Spanish wedding reception.

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— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) November 26, 2024

As it approaches its 38^th anniversary, the original Lethal Weapon is a film worth re-visiting as a snapshot of 1980s American chutzpah (or, perhaps, hubris) and a keystone in the development of the modern action movie; particularly what would become that genre’s relentless dedication to bullet-fuelled narration and the many bizarre justifications the makers of these films contrive to sustain the destructive pace.

The ostensive plot of the film revolves around an investigation into the death of a young woman called Amanda Hunsaker, a “troubled teen” (to borrow that oft-used tabloid phrase), who, over the opening credits, snorts cocaine, disrobes and leaps from a penthouse balcony in downtown LA, smashing into a parked car below; all to the jaunty accompaniment of “Jingle Bell Rock”.

The investigating detective is Sergeant Roger Murtagh, played by the wonderful Danny Glover, a veteran LAPD detective approaching retirement and already planning the many fishing trips he will partake of when he finally hangs up his trusty six shooter.

It quickly emerges that Miss Hunsaker was poisoned, therefore, even had she not taken her ill-advised naturist leap, she would have died anyway. This seems a curious waste of bacchanalian ammo but 80s action movies were nothing if not bracingly steadfast in their observance of the twin pillars of liberal excess of that era: toplessness and cocaine. The new evidence means the case has suddenly become a murder investigation. At this point, old-school action movie fans may worry that this early plot twist portends cerebral challenges to come but, rest assured, The Mousetrap this ain’t. No mystery will be conceived between the credits which cannot be solved by copious rounds of automatic gunfire or by ploughing a hastily commandeered vehicle into it.

Murtagh’s professional woes are amplified by the introduction of his new partner, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson, eyes still swiveling from his tenure as Mad Max and sporting a mullet which, even in 1987, seemed extravagant). Riggs is a recently-widowed burn-out case who the police psychiatrist—in what, these days, would amount to a serious breach of data protection regulation and client confidentiality—has warned may be a suicide risk. The scenes depicting Rigg’s breakdown are actually rather moving but, this being the 1980s, are wholly in service to the plot. Accordingly, an encounter with “a jumper” in a later scene is barely empathetic, serving only to highlight Riggs’ cold-eyed efficiency. This brutal sense of purpose will come to the fore as the story introduces Amanda Hunsacker’s father, who served in Vietnam with Murtagh and took a bayonet in the lungs en route to saving Murtagh’s life (“That was nice of him,” deadpans a suitably unimpressed Riggs).

The Vietnam war casts a hefty shadow over proceedings. 1980s viewers would have been more than a little familiar with that particular conflict, having— by that point—been subjected to a veritable barrage of ‘Nam movies and would, therefore, possess the requisite shorthand to follow Hunsacker’s various references as he informs Riggs and Murtagh of his involvement with a group of ex-military operatives called “Shadow Company” (the US military really ought to give more consideration to the naming of their units; one can’t imagine “Rainbow Unicorn Company” getting mixed up in this sort of illicit activity). Shadow Company have organised a shipment (drugs of course since this is distinctly pre-Amazon, when it seemed the only thing anyone shipped anywhere was kilos or “keys” of cocaine) only to find that the police may have already been informed of the planned exchange.

You see the problem (or, more accurately, a problem) with Shadow company, as highlighted by their main (possibly, only) customer, is that they are using mercs (mercenaries, not German cars). Clearly Shadow Company’s pre-sales brochure could have been clearer on these matters but this appears to be something of a red line for the customer in question, having, it seems, gotten used to dealing with regular street criminals who are, presumably, a more reliable breed and less given to prostituting their skills for the sake of a quick buck.

The customer’s distress produces a wonderfully wacky scene in which the head of Shadow Company, General Peter McAllister (played with relish by Mitchell Ryan’s eyebrows) demonstrates the trustworthiness of his merc employees by having one of them, Mr. Joshua (a perpetually snarling Gary Busey), suspend his forearm stoically above the customer’s flaming cigarette lighter.

Some clients might baulk at employee torture during a business meeting but this was the 1980s, before HR and concepts of workplace safety had gotten completely out of hand. Suitably reassured, though a little PTSD-ed, the customer departs to presumably close out the paperwork.

The client’s concern about mercs, however, is rather borne out by Shadow Company’s response to the knowledge that the police may be onto their shipment. It seems Shadow Company are not the sort of agency to treat delivery dates with flippancy. If only more suppliers were so committed; imagine how many LUAS lines, Rainbow Gardens or National Children’s Hospitals we might be sitting on now (though contract negotiations of the Shadow Company kind may be a little too intense for your average junior minister). It also quickly becomes apparent that these mercs take a similarly blunt approach to InfoSec. By way of keeping everything mum, Shadow Company proceed to blow up a prostitute’s house using mercury switches (“Gaflooey! That’s heavy shit!”), embark on a drive-by assassination of Hunsacker from a passing helicopter (Mr. Joshua inexplicably dressed in cricket gear for his shift on sniper duty) and kick off a war on the LAPD by shooting Riggs and abducting Murtagh’s teenage daughter. This provocation merely galvanizes Murtagh and Riggs who embark upon the cerebrally direct plan to “bury the funsters”, to borrow the wonderful substitute phrase used in the censored version of the film when it was aired on terrestrial television in the 1990s (the golden era of television censorship; the art form reaching a pinnacle with the fabulous reinterpretation of Midnight Run, containing the excellent “I’m going to stab you through the heart with this broken pencil”). It seems the solution to the endless paperwork and unreliability of the American justice system is to shoot all the bad guys before they can lawyer up. There is, of course, a long tradition in American action movies (and increasingly, in real life) of police officers conveniently “forgetting” their badges; a legal loophole which allows them to more efficiently eradicate unwanted sections of the criminal underworld. The Lethal Weapon films take this to a spectacular new level. At the end of the film, LA’s finest cordon off a crime scene so that they can stage an embryonic version of the Ultimate Fighting Championship between Riggs and Mr. Joshua. In the second installment of the series, shrewd application of this technique allows Riggs and Murtagh to bypass the tiresome diplomatic immunity privileges of their South African antagonists.

It’s worth mentioning that Shadow Company represented an “America First” approach to villainy at a time when home-grown talent more than held its own in the “bad guy” market—a situation soon to be undermined by an abundance of cheap foreign imports (see “Gruber v. McClane, 1988)”). It will be interesting to see if the new direction for American politics ushers in a return to home-produced miscreants.

What really makes Lethal Weapon tick is the chemistry between the leads. Gibson (before he adopted a more method approach, which somewhat seeped into his personal life) is all frothing angst and distemper while Glover is brilliant as everyone’s dad trapped in a cop movie, muttering lugubriously to himself (quite possibly about the immersion being left on), attempting to rap and beat-box at the dinner table (to the mortification of his kids), making crude Dad jokes and showing off so much for his new alpha male partner that he forgets to take the bins out, earning a chiding from his eldest daughter. Yet, there is an obvious warmth between the mismatched pair which carries the film along and is a big reason for the success of the movie franchise. The lack of a similar rapport between the leads is probably a good reason why the more recent television reboot didn’t work. That, and that the world had moved on and what worked in the 1980s doesn’t necessarily work anymore.

Indeed, much has changed since 1987 and this makes the original Lethal Weapon a fascinating re-watch. It’s not surprising that there are many areas where it strays beyond what would be acceptable today but this was a film and a franchise which always seemed displaced from reality even when reality was the 1980s and that tonal weirdness is even stranger looking back from a modern world in which, it seems, more-and-more so-called leaders would prefer we all travel backwards in time.

It’s particularly interesting to see Lethal Weapon’s foreshadowing of the faux-disassembling of macho male culture. In it we glimpse the beginnings (and, given what’s happening now, possibly the endings) of men’s reckoning with their emotions, including a detective who confides his belief that he’s an “80’s man” because he cried in bed, adding that he was not with a woman (“Why do you think I was crying?”); the faltering baby steps towards some sort of male introspection (“Do you want to hear that sometimes I think about eating a bullet?”); the commodification of male culture hinted at by Riggs when he suggests their putative reward for dispatching the bad guys will be “shaving head” commercials. Side note: Why men’s apparel never embraced the bare-torso-with-denim-jacket look (sported by Riggs in the final act) is beyond me (though it remains a summer wear staple in some parts of Dublin).

In subsequent sequels the Lethal Weapon franchise will, in its inimitable way, wrestle with Apartheid (“Free South Africa, you dumb son of a bitch!”), wildlife preservation (“Mom, Dad killed flipper!”) and — laughably — gun control (being careful to ensure that said control doesn’t extend to its gun-toting heroes). The writer Shane Black confessed he fretted daily about what the director, Richard Donner, would see or hear on his drive to the set which he might suddenly decide to include in the plot.

For anyone questioning why sexism isn’t on that list of inclusions, I would propose that the whole Lethal Weapon franchise is collectively a powerful argument against men being allowed to run anything remotely mission-critical for the human race.

Yet, for all its apparent moral probity, Lethal Weapon conserves its wagging to a single finger lest anything disturb the main task of depressing the Beretta’s trigger while spent cartridges spew from its belly with the metallic effervescence of a jackpotting slot machine. The screenwriter, Shane Black, is far too savvy for all of this to be taken completely serious and Lethal Weapon is a film which becomes more enjoyable the less seriously it is taken.

So, as we count in another Christmas, there is no better time to revisit the OG in what has become a burgeoning movie subgenre. Modern audiences have embraced the concept of non-traditional Christmas subjects so what better way to shatter the hegemony of saccharine Santa Claus films than by watching a scowling Gary Busey unload his clip into a television set showing a reforming Ebenezer Scrooge.

This holiday season, I invite you to a 1980s genre-crossover feast where we shall follow the spicy starter that is Gremlins with the palate-cleansing Lethal Weapon before closing out the seasonal fare with the hearty Die Hard. But, as you marvel at John McClane’s heroics in Nakatomi Plaza, remember that none of this would have been possible if Riggs and Murtagh had not “buried the funsters” in that first high-octane offering.