LETHAL WEAPON 4

• Starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover
• Directed by Richard Donner
• Rated R, with profanity, graphic violence and nudity; running time 120 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a 5

Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(July 10, 1998) -- In Lethal Weapon 4, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover join forces to battle a giant lizard that is rampaging through Manhattan.

Oops, wrong blockbuster.

Actually, in Lethal Weapon 4, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover team up to fly into space, where they blow up an asteroid that threatens to collide with Earth.

Just kidding.

Still, after watching Lethal Weapon 4, I can say that those imaginary plot lines aren't any more far-fetched than what they've actually come up with for LW4. As lame as both Godzilla and Armegeddon are, they don't have the "we're making this up as we go along because you people will buy anything" attitude that this throw-away endeavor does.

It's hard to take any film seriously with the number 4 in the title. Yet the Lethal Weapon series is one of those rare phenomena in which the movies have gotten better, rather than worse, since the original film was released in 1987. Which isn't saying much, given how dim (and overrated) the first one was.

Although all of them have been directed by Richard Donner, a master of cheap audience manipulation, the scripts weren't all written by the similarly formulaic Shane Black. Although the action plots have remained panderingly preposterous, the character stories actually have improved. In NYPD Blue veteran Channing Gibson's script for LW4, the writing quality is actually on a level with the best TV, something too many movies barely aspire to.

But it's a strange grafting of comedy to bang-bang that doesn't take, like an organ transplant that is rejected.

At heart, LW4 is about the aging Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and the aging Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), forced to confront their own mortality, yet again. For Riggs, living with fellow cop Lorna Cole (Rene Russo), it's the prospect of fatherhood when Lorna becomes pregnant. He may be ready to be a parent, but is he willing to commit to marriage again (after his first wife was murdered -- the set-up for the first film)?

Murtaugh, meanwhile, must cope with incipient grandparenthood. While he thinks his oldest daughter is pregnant and unwed, she actually is secretly married to a young police detective named Lee Butters (Chris Rock). But Murtaugh has repeatedly said that no daughter of his will ever marry a cop, which is why they haven't told him.

Butters tries buttering up Murtaugh on the job before revealing the truth, but Murtaugh is uncomfortable with the younger man's attention. His discomfort level rises when Riggs (who knows the truth) suggests that, in fact, Butters' solicitude reflects a physical attraction to Murtaugh.

Now that sounds like a perfectly serviceable movie plot, right? A decent little comedy about two men coping with aging in their own ways -- it could be straight of out the Sundance Festival.

Except that, of course, Donner and producer Joel Silver shoehorn in an entire action plot, involving the smuggling of Chinese immigrant slave labor, the counterfeiting of foreign currency and the freeing of a group of Chinese crime lords.

Those scenes -- the ones with all the fisticuffs and pyrotechnics -- are stitched into the rest of the movies, almost as if to say, "This is what people are really paying for." I can imagine the story conference where Gibson was presented with the special-effects wishlist:

"We've got this great idea for a stunt involving a guy surfing on the freeway by kneeling on an upside-down table while being dragged by a semi at high speed. And, oh yeah, a car chase where a car goes flying through an office building, smashes a bunch of desks in an office, then hurtles out the other side -- and lands back on the freeway, right behind the bad guy's car.

"Let's see, we need a scene of a gas tanker exploding because people like big explosions with massive balls of fire. We want not one but three sequences of cars getting smashed by fast-moving trains. And a scene where a family is trapped in a burning house -- that'll keep 'em happy. Plus a few fights in the rain, fistfights, gunfights, yada yada.

"Now figure out a way to work them in."

The chief bad guy is played by Jet Li, one of the hottest martial-arts stars in Hong Kong. Lithe and menacing, he brings his action sequences to electrifying life; where the fights between Gibson and Li's henchmen seem choreographed, Li's moves are spontaneous and frighteningly swift.

Yes, there are a lot of laughs in Lethal Weapon 4, thanks to the riffs by Joe Pesci (as the pesky Leo Getz) and Chris Rock. Yet, when you stop and analyze those scenes, most of them have nothing to do with the plot -- either plot. A lengthy Rock-Pesci dialogue about the problem with cellular phones sounds like a comedy routine transplanted inorganically to the film.

Sloppily entertaining (like most of Donner's films), Lethal Weapon 4 is also calculated and by-the numbers. Even as you laugh at the jokes, it's hard not to resent how little effort has gone into telling an actual story here.