Lethal Weapon 4

The Set Up
Riggs, Murtaugh and Leo Getz stumble upon a slave trade-like illegal immigrant operation whilst fishing. Murtaugh takes a poor Chinese family under his wing and goes after the Triad gang responsible, whilst Riggs starts to suspect his buddy of being on the take. New detective Lee Butters (Chris Rock) comes to their aid as they journey into chinatown to face off against Wah Sing Ku (Jet Li), the Triad leader who has taken to exploiting immigrants in order to fund the release of Triad criminals back in China via a corrupt Chinese general.

Riggs
Is starting to feel his age and no longer feels that fire in his belly now that he's becoming a family man. He's shacked up with Lorna in his caravan-home, and she is heavily pregnant with his child. Riggs questions whether he should marry Lorna or not as he still doesn't feel ready after the death of his wife. He also no longer has his bad 80s mullet, and he uses his dislocatable shoulder as an excuse to get out of a sparring match in the police gym. He doesn't seem to be the 'lethal weapon' he was back in the first film, and gets the crap kicked out of him several times as a result. Both Murtaugh and Riggs get promoted to captains due to becoming too expensive for the department's insurance to cover them.

Murtaugh
Seems to have a lot more cash, much to the puzzlement of Riggs and his other fellow police officers, but is unaware of the rumours of corruption surrounding him. He takes the semi-enslavement of the illegal Chinese immigrants rather personally due to his black heritage, and bends the law to take in a family of escaped immigrants (he sees it as 'freeing slaves'). He spouts pro-immigration tracts to bigoted civil servants, "I s'pose you're Native American, huh?" and is still both a source of mirth for Riggs and his other colleagues (especially after Riggs convinces him to strip to his underpants and act like a chicken at the film's beginning) and for the audience (he pursues a suspect by commandeering a bicycle). Murtaugh is also about to become a grandfather, though his daughter is yet to tell him who the father is.

Villains
The Triad gangs are much more effective villains than the rogue cop in Lethal Weapon 3 or the mercenaries in the first Lethal Weapon, but the South Africans in Lethal Weapon 2 still take the cake as the best overall villains of the series. Jet Li is creepy and effective as the stoic badass gangleader Wah Sing Ku, but Kim Chan steals the show as the genial Uncle Benny (with his catchphrase, "Bloody marvellous"). Jet Li sports a bad queue-styled rat's tail, only has one line of English dialogue, and gets to show off his cool martial arts skills on a couple of occasions. He also spends a lot of the film fondling a string of beads in a sinister manner and looking like he's just stepped directly out of a Hong Kong kung fu film.

Supporting Characters
The cast of supporting characters grows and grows... Leo Getz is as annoying as ever, and is also irritatingly accompanied by Looney-Tunes-ish comedy music. He's now a Private Investigator, reveals that he is descended from German Jews and starts wearing a stupid-looking pork pie hat. He also a surprisingly touching moment with Riggs towards the end of the film, giving Joe Pesci a rare opportunity to show his greater abilities as a serious actor. Rene Russo also returns as Rigg's love interest, though she doesn't feature as much due to her character being pregnant. Murtaugh's family still appears but only barely, and Chris Rock joins the team as an out-of-place angry young detective and the impending father of Murtaugh's grandchild. Dr. Woods, the police psychiatrist seen in the previous three films, also has a cameo.

Gotta Love Hollywood
Despite being made in the late 90s, Lethal Weapon 4 probably has the highest offence rate of the franchise when it comes to cliches and suspension of disbelief. The police chief, without the slightest sense of irony, refers to Murtaugh, Riggs and himself as 'dinosaurs'. The entire film is filled with distractingly hokey incidental music, and continues to show a flagrant disregard for real life police regulations and the rights of average citizens (case in point - when Riggs and Murtaugh decides to smash up a Chinese restaurant due to Uncle Benny's lack of co-operation). There's also the standard irrelevant action sequence at the beginning of the film, complete with requisite massive fuel tanker explosion. Lethal Weapon 4 also introduces a convenient Chinese-American detective character that we've never seen before in order to provide a realistic source of exposition, and there's a sudden and randomly ominous cutaway to a high-security prison in communist China about halfway through the movie. There are also two car-related sequences that might leave viewers squawking in disbelief... one scene shows a car getting slowly pushed into the path of a train and the driver holding his hands up and screaming for the better part of the minute rather than thinking to just get out of the vehicle. Another scene laughably has Riggs smashing a car window with his bare hand and pulling a bad guy through it without even the slightest injury to himself. There's also plenty of bad jokes, so I'll just quote the one...

TRISH: I thought you were coming home last night.
MURTAUGH: Yeah... I had some bad chinese.

Also, the film ends with a cheesy freeze-frame where everyone poses for a photo and shouts "We're family!"

Final Outcome
By and large, the last film in the franchise isn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it might be. All four films are surprisingly consistent in tone and quality, and Lethal Weapon 4 doesn't depart from the formula in the slightest (witness the lack of fanfare attached to the re-introduction of Riggs and Murtaugh at the film's beginning). I think the success of this film (and the others) lies in the fact that it never gets too self-congratulatory and a lot of the emphasis is put on the standard Hollywood action sequences and new developments in the relationships between the characters. By this point it's almost like a soap opera, and the film wisely avoids trying to canonise itself, resisting the nostalgia angle until the cool polaroid-based credit sequence at the end.

I'm Getting Too Old for This Shit
It's Riggs' turn to embody the immortal line, with Murtaugh saying to Riggs understandingly "You're getting too old for this shit" at the 55 minute mark. They then start chanting a mantra together, "We're not too old for this shit", in an embarrassing display of camraderie. Riggs later gives in at the 99 minute mark with the line, "I'm too old for this shit too".

TRIVIA: Mel Gibson originally wanted his character killed off to ensure there would be no further Lethal Weapon films but had so much fun making this film that he actually offered to make a fifth one when shooting wrapped up.

This is Jet Li's first English-language film and the first time he ever played a villain. Jackie Chan was offered the role first but Chan turned it down as he never plays villains.

DIRECTOR: Richard Donner
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Channing Gibson, based on a story by Jonathan Lemkin, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (and based on characters created by Shane Black)
KEY ACTORS: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Jet Li, Rene Russo, Chris Rock, Kim Chan, Steve Kahan, Mary Ellen Trainor

RELATED TEXTS
- The first three Lethal Weapon films: Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3.
- Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was written by original Lethal Weapon scripter Shane Black as a reaction against the many cliches of the Hollywood action/thriller genre (with the Lethal Weapon being one of the main culprits for this sort of thing).

AWARDS
Nominated for various popular-choice awards in America, but no wins.