Retro Cinema: Lethal Weapon

No Christmas is complete without at least one viewing of the opening scene of Lethal Weapon, in which the happy melody of Jingle Bell Rock fades into the vision of a coked-out, topless Amanda Hunsaker preparing to pay for all the sins of 80s excess with one perfectly executed swan-dive off a high-rise balcony and onto the waiting windshield of a car below. I won't be so brash as to call it the best scene in the entire Lethal canon -- the 'death by surfboard' sequence in Lethal Weapon 2 is tough to beat -- but it's certainly up there, and fun for the whole family. It's also one of several Christmas-focused scenes throughout the film, another favorite of which would be the coke-deal gone bad in the Christmas tree lot, with Martin Riggs unwisely revealing himself as a cop to the bad guys before he has the drop on them -- what is he, suicidal or something? -- and then getting into a full-blown gunfight with several hoods amongst all those pine needles.

Lethal Weapon has some similarities with another Christmas classic, Gremlins, in that it draws a lot of its negative energy from the idea that if your life sucks, it's going to suck a lot worse during the holidays. The film's most resonating scene -- the one for which a set trailer reportedly had to be ready-made at all times for whenever Mel Gibson felt like he could act the scene -- comes with Riggs being overcome by the absence of his recently-deceased wife (those South African bastards) and putting a hollow-point bullet into his 9mm and putting the 9mm in his mouth. Just as he's about to depress the trigger, you can hear Bugs Bunny shouting Christmas tidings on the television opposite, and it looks like it's all over. It's easy to overlook how good the acting is here -- Mel is really firing on all cylinders in the scene. I have no idea if he's ever done a DVD commentary for the film, but if he has I'd probably want to listen to hear what he has to say about that scene.

That's about as close as the holiday comes to actually being used as a plot device -- Riggs and Murtaugh aren't beaten with giant candy canes during their torture sessions or anything -- but little moments still come and go throughout the movie where the fact that all of this is happening at Christmas is used to pack an added punch. I especially love the moment -- actually, I love this entire scene -- where the great character actor Ed O'Ross thinks to tell the heroin smuggling mercinaries 'Merry Christmas' as he's leaving their disco, after they've just implied that he'll be burned alive if he fails to have the money ready on time. That was thoughtful of him. And of course, who can forget the great Gary Busey moment in which his boss character, Mr. Joshua, shows up at Murtaugh's house to blow away his family and starts talking to the TV, which is very Busey-like. As a Scrooge-like character on the box is heard saying "What day is it, Sir?" Busey screams "The day of Christmas!" and starts firing his gun. Priceless.

Although I hold the unpopular opinion that Lethal Weapon 2 is actually slightly superior to the original -- an opinion I'll happily defend if you confront me with a broken beer bottle in a dark alley and demand I explain myself -- I have to say that no other movie in the Lethal canon ever found as successful a backdrop as Christmas on which to hang their Looney Tunes mayhem. Part two is all about confronting apartheid and how living in L.A. sucks, while part three is apparently the result of a conversation that went something like 'What if we tried to make a Lethal Weapon movie out of a Boyz II Men video?' and the fourth one ... well, the less said about that the better. Entire dissertations have probably been written on how Riggs and Murtaugh suddenly gain psychic abilities in the fourth installment of the series. If there's ever a fifth movie, I hope they actually follow that through with that crazy twist and explain the origins of their newfound supernatural abilities. That would be something.