Beginning with the first Christopher Reeves Superman movie, the creative concept guys at Warner Bros. realized that if you sank millions of dollars into a B-movie formula, including hiring the right cast and crew, you would not only get millions of dollars in return, but everybody would be talking about it like it was an A-class film. (This knowledge had already been discovered by the James Bond team, but only with the success of Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films did it at last become obvious to all.) Look, Lethal Weapon, like so many other action films since that discovery was made, is a factory product. Some committee came up with the idea and set about hiring a team to realize it. It is all surface and no substance. There's no vision here, it's all meant to make money, that's all.
I enjoy this film, very much - I've seen it over and over again, and I am thrilled by the action scenes and amused by the humor. But great film-making this is NOT. It's very slick, but it's also noisy, and clunky in spots, exploitative (did we really need to see the porn film the dead girl made?), overlong (with occasionally questionable editing choices), and it's "dramatic" moments are clearly intended to manipulate rather than arouse our emotions. This isn't even remarking the lack of realism regarding police procedure or the consequences of the behavior of the two heroes. Finally, as is apt for a B-movie, all the major players ham it up something fierce.
But all this is entirely forgivable once one admits that, yeah, it's just a B-movie, after all, an amusing way to spend two hours when you have nothing better to do and want to watch good guys chase bad guys and blow things up.
I enjoy this film, very much - I've seen it over and over again, and I am thrilled by the action scenes and amused by the humor. But great film-making this is NOT. It's very slick, but it's also noisy, and clunky in spots, exploitative (did we really need to see the porn film the dead girl made?), overlong (with occasionally questionable editing choices), and it's "dramatic" moments are clearly intended to manipulate rather than arouse our emotions. This isn't even remarking the lack of realism regarding police procedure or the consequences of the behavior of the two heroes. Finally, as is apt for a B-movie, all the major players ham it up something fierce.
But all this is entirely forgivable once one admits that, yeah, it's just a B-movie, after all, an amusing way to spend two hours when you have nothing better to do and want to watch good guys chase bad guys and blow things up.