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Lethal Weapon (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // R // June 27, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $28.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Lethal Weapon opens with a coked-up, 
bare-breasted blonde leaping off a ritzy high-rise to her death. No dialogue. No narration. No other characters are introduced. Just drugs, boobs, and a sunroof-shattering suicide*. Kinda grabs your attention.
Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) are both naked too when we meet 'em afterwards. I guess it's a motif. Even if you've never seen Lethal Weapon before, and...really? how?....pop culture demands that you know the characters: Murtaugh is the straightlaced, fifty year old family man who's too old for this shit, and Riggs is the reckless, suicidal, trigger-happy nutcase. The buddy cop formula requires that these two polar opposites team up and investigate the death of this pretty young thing, and when a hooker's house explodes and a banker-slash-Vietnam buddy is gunned down in his lavish waterfront home from a helicopter, Murtaugh and Riggs find themselves ensnared in an enormous heroin smuggling ring. Kidnapping, torture, car chases, a shotgun blast to the chest, shattered necks, several handfuls of grenades, leg-wrestling, a helicopter plowing into a limo in the middle of a desert shootout, Gary Busey as the heroin ring's psychopathic muscle...c'mon, it's a classic.
Well, "classic" might be
pushing it -- it's not even the best action flick of '87, with that nod going to Predator -- but it is one of the better buddy cop movies of the past twenty-five years, re-re-redefining the template that 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop set and paving the way for unwatchable knockoffs like Red Heat, Pat Morita and Jay Leno's Collision Course, and, um, Lethal Weapon 4. Lethal Weapon takes a slightly different approach from the sequels that would follow, placing less of an emphasis on laughs. This is a movie, after all, where one of its lead characters is so depressed that he totes around a hollow point bullet to keep handy when he musters up the nerve to splatter his brains against the wall.
Even with that more intense, intriguingly dark undercurrent, Shane Black's screenplay has the breeziness that a modern day summer blockbuster ought to have, managing to be equal parts funny, exciting, and fun without leaning too heavily on ridiculously over-the-top action setpieces as a crutch or feeling insultingly dumb. The action is unrelenting but not exhaustingly so, and a big chunk of the reason it works is that the two leads are so damned likeable. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are both charismatic in their own right and play off each other extremely well, and their characters have enough depth that there's more behind the way they behave than a screenwriter marching in lockstep with genre conventions. The movie is more about these two men than just coming up with an excuse to string together a bunch of explosions and shootouts, and that's why Lethal Weapon is still so well-liked and why there wasn't a Beverly Hills Cop 4.
Video: The 1.78:1 high-definition image looks its best in brightly-lit interiors and sunny exteriors, which, as luck would have it, happens to make up most of the runtime. Colors and black levels are typically strong throughout, although contrast can be somewhat variable, contributing to a sort of inconsistency between shots from particular angles within the same scene. Although the majority of the brighter shots are rather sharp and detailed, Lethal Weapon often looks flatter and grainier in the film's more dimly-lit stretches. I'm left with the impression that some of these less impressive moments are more of a result of the original photography than anything specific to this transfer, though, and the source material is otherwise
clean and free of any noticeable artifacting. Because of its somewhat inconsistent appearance, Lethal Weapon doesn't rank up with the best of Warner's HD DVDs to date, but it's a reasonably impressive presentation for the most part and a dramatic leap forward from what I'd expect from previous DVDs.
Audio: Lethal Weapon's Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is teeming with ambiance and does a solid job spreading the music by Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton across each speaker. The gunfire and explosions are accompanied by a fairly hefty low-frequency kick, and the score and various sound effects come through clearly and distinctly. Some of the looped dialogue sounds ridiculously artificial, such as when Joshua is first introduced, but I can't bring myself to blame the encoding of this soundtrack for that. Not in the same league as more recent megabudget blockbusters but definitely better than I was expecting.
A stereo French dub is also provided, as are subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Considering that Lethal Weapon was one of the most popular and most influential action flicks to come out of the '80s, it's kinda disappointing that there's next to nothing here: just a trailer and five minutes of deleted scenes that reinforce that Riggs is a loner, Dottie...a rebel. None of the extras are in high-definition, but at least they're presented in anamorphic widescreen.
Conclusion: Okay, Lethal Weapon wasn't stunningly original even back in 1987, some of the dialogue -- especially its stabs at humor -- can be pretty clunky, and the movie has at least a couple of absurd if still tremendously entertaining action sequences. Lethal Weapon may not be one for the ages, but it's a solid, well-acted, above-average action flick, and that's good enough for me. Recommended.
* Actually, there isn't a sunroof. I'm just a sucker for alliteration.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from Warner's official Lethal Weapon site and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD. Pictures make things pretty.
bare-breasted blonde leaping off a ritzy high-rise to her death. No dialogue. No narration. No other characters are introduced. Just drugs, boobs, and a sunroof-shattering suicide*. Kinda grabs your attention. Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) are both naked too when we meet 'em afterwards. I guess it's a motif. Even if you've never seen Lethal Weapon before, and...really? how?....pop culture demands that you know the characters: Murtaugh is the straightlaced, fifty year old family man who's too old for this shit, and Riggs is the reckless, suicidal, trigger-happy nutcase. The buddy cop formula requires that these two polar opposites team up and investigate the death of this pretty young thing, and when a hooker's house explodes and a banker-slash-Vietnam buddy is gunned down in his lavish waterfront home from a helicopter, Murtaugh and Riggs find themselves ensnared in an enormous heroin smuggling ring. Kidnapping, torture, car chases, a shotgun blast to the chest, shattered necks, several handfuls of grenades, leg-wrestling, a helicopter plowing into a limo in the middle of a desert shootout, Gary Busey as the heroin ring's psychopathic muscle...c'mon, it's a classic.
Well, "classic" might be
pushing it -- it's not even the best action flick of '87, with that nod going to Predator -- but it is one of the better buddy cop movies of the past twenty-five years, re-re-redefining the template that 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop set and paving the way for unwatchable knockoffs like Red Heat, Pat Morita and Jay Leno's Collision Course, and, um, Lethal Weapon 4. Lethal Weapon takes a slightly different approach from the sequels that would follow, placing less of an emphasis on laughs. This is a movie, after all, where one of its lead characters is so depressed that he totes around a hollow point bullet to keep handy when he musters up the nerve to splatter his brains against the wall. Even with that more intense, intriguingly dark undercurrent, Shane Black's screenplay has the breeziness that a modern day summer blockbuster ought to have, managing to be equal parts funny, exciting, and fun without leaning too heavily on ridiculously over-the-top action setpieces as a crutch or feeling insultingly dumb. The action is unrelenting but not exhaustingly so, and a big chunk of the reason it works is that the two leads are so damned likeable. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are both charismatic in their own right and play off each other extremely well, and their characters have enough depth that there's more behind the way they behave than a screenwriter marching in lockstep with genre conventions. The movie is more about these two men than just coming up with an excuse to string together a bunch of explosions and shootouts, and that's why Lethal Weapon is still so well-liked and why there wasn't a Beverly Hills Cop 4.
Video: The 1.78:1 high-definition image looks its best in brightly-lit interiors and sunny exteriors, which, as luck would have it, happens to make up most of the runtime. Colors and black levels are typically strong throughout, although contrast can be somewhat variable, contributing to a sort of inconsistency between shots from particular angles within the same scene. Although the majority of the brighter shots are rather sharp and detailed, Lethal Weapon often looks flatter and grainier in the film's more dimly-lit stretches. I'm left with the impression that some of these less impressive moments are more of a result of the original photography than anything specific to this transfer, though, and the source material is otherwise
clean and free of any noticeable artifacting. Because of its somewhat inconsistent appearance, Lethal Weapon doesn't rank up with the best of Warner's HD DVDs to date, but it's a reasonably impressive presentation for the most part and a dramatic leap forward from what I'd expect from previous DVDs. Audio: Lethal Weapon's Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is teeming with ambiance and does a solid job spreading the music by Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton across each speaker. The gunfire and explosions are accompanied by a fairly hefty low-frequency kick, and the score and various sound effects come through clearly and distinctly. Some of the looped dialogue sounds ridiculously artificial, such as when Joshua is first introduced, but I can't bring myself to blame the encoding of this soundtrack for that. Not in the same league as more recent megabudget blockbusters but definitely better than I was expecting.
A stereo French dub is also provided, as are subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Considering that Lethal Weapon was one of the most popular and most influential action flicks to come out of the '80s, it's kinda disappointing that there's next to nothing here: just a trailer and five minutes of deleted scenes that reinforce that Riggs is a loner, Dottie...a rebel. None of the extras are in high-definition, but at least they're presented in anamorphic widescreen.
Conclusion: Okay, Lethal Weapon wasn't stunningly original even back in 1987, some of the dialogue -- especially its stabs at humor -- can be pretty clunky, and the movie has at least a couple of absurd if still tremendously entertaining action sequences. Lethal Weapon may not be one for the ages, but it's a solid, well-acted, above-average action flick, and that's good enough for me. Recommended.
* Actually, there isn't a sunroof. I'm just a sucker for alliteration.
Standard image disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review were lifted from Warner's official Lethal Weapon site and don't necessarily reflect the appearance of this HD DVD. Pictures make things pretty.
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