Lethal Weapon (1987)
Directed by Richard Donner
A veteran cop and an unstable detective become partners who must put their differences aside in order to bring down a heroin-smuggling ring run by ex-Special Forces.
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What critics compared Lethal Weapon to
For the sequel, Dubuque decided to inject humor into the story and turn the movie into a buddy/cop action thriller in the vein of the Lethal Weapon films. In fact, the tone of this sequel is very similar to the first two of that 80s action franchise, where the first movie is dark and serious, and the sequel is much more lighthearted, as is the case with Lethal Weapon 1 and 2.
…letting the movie operate as a buddy action comedy in the vein of 48 Hrs. or Lethal Weapon…
It’s almost as if we were mixing CSI: [Insert City Here] and Lethal Weapon.
…resembling classics of the genre like Midnight Run or Lethal Weapon…
One thing you likely would have never anticipated after seeing The Accountant was probably…well, a sequel…but also a pivot to an action buddy comedy of the Lethal Weapon variety.
…la de las llamadas buddy movies -como lo fue la saga Arma mortal…
Not long afterwards came Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines in “Running Scared” (1986) and an inspired pairing of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover for the first “Lethal Weapon” film (1987) that really reinforced the loose cannon-conservative lawman match-up.
In the vein of ’80s action classics like 48 Hrs. and Lethal Weapon, The Heat is a modern rendition on the buddy cop film.
Paying homage to its genre roots, The Heat opens with a bouncy '70s-cop-show credit sequence, and follows it by twice mastering the vanishing art of the efficient character introduction; in just a few short minutes, it proves itself as deft as even the likes of Lethal Weapon at nailing down exactly who these two wildly different characters are.
In "The Heat" we're closer to full-on action mode, akin to "48 Hrs." or "Lethal Weapon" territory than a spoofy affair on the order of the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie "The Other Guys."
The characters deal with things Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh and Riggs never would have had to worry about.
They're set loose on a flimsy, Lethal Weapon-y drug case, an excuse for the ol' odd-couple tropes to play out: the uncool Ashburn needs to learn not to be so uptight, while the hard Mullins needs to learn to let down her emotional guard.
Black, who hit it big straight out of college with the screenplay for Lethal Weapon, has made a career out of a “have your cake and eat it, too” mentality, deconstructing clichés even as he gorges himself on them.
Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star in "The Nice Guys" a new film written and directed by Shane ("Lethal Weapon") Black.
The movie is written and directed by Shane Black, who wrote the first two Lethal Weapon movies and, more recently, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3.
That’s the level of humor in The Nice Guys, the latest endeavor from Shane Black, whose Lethal Weapon helped make him the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood thirty years ago.
The Nice Guys was written and directed by Shane Black, who also wrote The Lethal Weapon movies.
Maybe Black was trying too hard to regain the panache of his screenplay for "Lethal Weapon," or a case of living up to his working title, "You'll Never Die in This Town Again," or Brett Halliday's novel "Bodies Are Where You find Them" from which he adapted it but, from the start we're subjected to Robert Downey Jr.'s narration in a mix of frenzied free thought and Raymond Chandler channeling.
Black, who wrote the original "Lethal Weapon," walks that line, and it's not an easy line.
Anyway, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" is a first-time directorial effort by Shane Black, who is nevertheless no stranger to humorous action movies, having written "Lethal Weapon," "Last Action Hero," and "The Last Boy Scout."
Shane Black may be known for writing the Lethal Weapon movies, but he takes his buddy-cop idea to a new dimension.
And Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, wrote Shane "Lethal Weapon" Black, a writer turned writer-director who wanted to sum up everything he has learned about wiseacre buddy comedies and trigger-happy and bloody detective movies.
Then, just as suddenly as he had burst onto the scene (with the Lethal Weapon screenplay), he dropped off the industry radar.
Black, who costarred in the original Predator and cowrote this new installment, has intermittently flourished as both a writer (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout) and a writer-director (Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys), and he remains a reliable source of zippy and fantastically profane dialogue, the laughs and the winces layered just so.
With Shane Black’s previous works, including the Lethal Weapon scripts and 2016’s The Nice Guys, Black has a track record of great humour.
Shane Black is primarily known in some circles for appearing in a supporting role in the original Predator, better known in other circles for penning such action romps as Lethal Weapon and Last Action Hero, and mainly known in my circle for writing and directing the underrated gems Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys.
There was great promise in Black’s involvement; as one of the better craftsman of ’80s popcorn (“Lethal Weapon,” “Monster Squad”) turned thoughtful post-millennial filmmaker (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “The Nice Guys”), there might be no better choice.
Back in 1987, Black was an up-and-coming writer (Lethal Weapon) and an actor with a single credit to his name.
Writer-director Shane Black, a snappy-patter specialist, was an actor in the first Predator film, wrote Lethal Weapon that same year, and has now scripted this picture with fellow genre buff Fred Dekker.
At best, you’ll generally get some sort of middle ground in between options 1 and 2 which pretty well sums up writer-director Shane Black’s (“Lethal Weapon,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”) stab at “Iron Man 3.”
The movie has some claim on being the best of the series, thanks largely to the input of its co-writer and director, Shane Black (who wrote Lethal Weapon , The Last Boy Scout and my nomination for the finest action movie of the 1990s, The Long Kiss Goodnight ).
Director/co-screenwriter Shane Black (who wrote the screenplay for the first two Lethal Weapon films) replaces Jon Favreau, the director/co-star of the first two installments.
It’s very much not ironic that screenwriters Shane Black — yes, Lethal Weapon Shane Black — and Drew Pearce, a British TV writer, are playing around a lot with trying to figure out just what it is that makes Tony Stark Iron Man… and what makes us believe that a suit of armor represents heroism.
Essentially, just as Joss Whedon’s distinct storytelling voice was recognisable in Avengers Assemble , so too is that of Iron Man 3 ’s helmer Shane Black, writer-director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and scribe of films like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout .
Here to handle Tony Stark's PTSD with humor and explosions is Shane Black, the man who wrote "Lethal Weapon" (that seems appropriate) and wrote and directed "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," a criminally under-seen 2005 noir-ish meta-comedy that also starred Robert Downey Jr. "Iron Man 3" is only the second film Black has directed (he co-wrote it with Drew Pearce), but he takes control of the franchise with the crazy, assured aplomb of one of his characters.
The homages to hugely popular pictures are crystal clear, but the genre-spoofing moviemakers have done their homework – scenes derived from “First Blood,” “Die Hard,” “Lethal Weapon,” Sergio Leone’s “The Man With No Name” trilogy, “Straw Dogs,” “Chinatown,” “Brannigan,” and countless others are lampooned with varying degrees of subtlety, each being every bit as amusing, especially for eagle-eyed action connoisseurs.
Much of the success of "Hot Fuzz" should be credited to director Wright, who accomplishes the delicate balancing act of paying tribute to movies like "Lethal Weapon" and "Bullitt" while poking fun at the same time.
Aside from the obvious nepotism Danny's name might imply, he's also got a rather casual relationship with reality, having informed his police sensibilities with every American Cop Movie from Dirty Harry to Lethal Weapon to Die Hard... but his favorites (and the ones both laughingly paid tribute to and viciously skewered by Hot Fuzz) are Bad Boys II and Point Break.
There’s a good deal of Lethal Weapon references, as well as Terminator 2 ones.
Teaming the all-business/all-the-time Angel and the let's-have-an-ice-cream Butterman is like throwing Laurel and Hardy into Lethal Weapon.
The Matrix series, the Die Hard Series, the Lethal Weapon series, and John Woo’s films are only the tip of the iceberg.
Both Shaun and Hot Fuzz eased audiences into their original stories via satirical pastiche, playing on our collective memories of Dawn of the Dead and Lethal Weapon respectively.
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While “Lethal Weapon 4” kind of poked fun at Riggs and Murtaugh directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah manage to show the pair here at a crossroads in their lives where they don’t think jumping in to a hail of bullets is fun anymore.
It veered close to parody of the quip-laden rogue cop movies of the 1980s like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard.
Back in the day, the Bad Boys films were attempts to push the tried-and-tired cop-buddy thriller into increasingly more ludicrous and offensive territory; they were extravagant and silly and morally dodgy in ways that even over-the-top hits like Lethal Weapon wouldn’t dare match.
Bad Boys ’ dusty 1980s roots finally get some nourishment too, as the story (which doesn’t really matter, but is competently written by Joe Carnahan, Peter Craig, and Chris Bremner) is essentially what would happen if you fell asleep in the middle of a classic Miami Vice episode and tried explaining it the next morning: Will Smith is Sonny Crockett, Martin Lawrence is... well, he's less Ricardo Tubbs than he is Lethal Weapon ’s Roger Murtaugh, but that's '80s as hell, so it still tracks.
Arguably, a series about two Miami cops taking down bad guys has been better than it had any right to be, but it managed to break away from being a Lethal Weapon clone and do its own thing on the strength of its leads and the cartoonish set pieces.
The buddy movie genre is the distillation of that idea into its purest form, and we have seen instant classics like Lethal Weapon, 48 hrs., and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang debut on the big screen as a result.
Directed by Patrick Hughes (“The Expendibles 3”) from a script by Tom O’Connor (“Fire With Fire”), “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” seems reverseengineered to ape every middlebrow late-’80s-to-mid-’90s testosterone-fest, from “ Lethal Weapon ” to “ Bad Boys .”
Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson team up as a pair of bickering, sharp-shooting, hard-punching action partners in a movie that replicates, step by formulaic step, the familiar and now oddly dated template of the inter-racial buddy movies of the Eighties (think 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon).
The aim of screenwriter Tom O’Connor and director Patrick Hughes (“The Expendables 3”) was clearly to resurrect the mismatched-buddy actioners of the 1980s, which Shane Black had pretty much codified in the first two “Lethal Weapon” movies.
Anybody who’s seen 48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon and their ilk can fill in the blanks from here: Kincaid and Bryce don’t get along at first, learn how to play nice, and by the end are saving each other’s bacon.
Director Patrick Hughes and screenwriter Tom O’Connor were clearly going for one of those mismatched buddy cop flicks of the 90s, but with nothing approaching the sadistic charm of Lethal Weapon or the populist allure of Die Hard, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is just a forgettable, foul-mouthed blood-fest that repeatedly misses the mark with nearly everything it tries to do.
This affords Tatum and Foxx a lot of shared screen time, in which they project an effortless, ingratiating chemistry that recalls Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the first “Lethal Weapon” pic, the characters bonding as fathers and patriots whenever they aren’t dodging bullets.
What made classics like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon so great?
If “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” had a baby, the offspring would look something like this.
That stunt occurs in one of the sequences of antic humor — in this case a Keystone Kops car chase — which, despite the tonal strangeness alongside the wanton destruction, prove that Foxx and Tatum are able heirs to the “Lethal Weapon” brand of brothers-in-arms banter.
With almost no storytelling logic or topical relevance, clumsy plot twists and absurd motives for its villains, it resembles a rejected idea for another Lethal Weapon sequel.
This is helped in no small part by Captain Marvel’s 1990s setting: not only with sight gags involving Blockbuster Video and Street Fighter II arcade cabinets, but also with a structure and sense of humour that feel like the midpoint between Lethal Weapon and Suburban Commando.
“Planet C-53”), Boden and Fleck pepper the film with cheeky references (Vers lands in a Blockbuster Video, where she promptly photon-blasts the head off of an Arnold Schwarzenegger standee and peruses a VHS copy of The Right Stuff ) and tease the idea of a Lethal Weapon -style buddy-cop action movie (first with two Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., then with Vers and Nick Fury), complete with car chase.
Keeping with the themes of subplots and shinagaiens, Jackson’s Fury and Clark Gregg’s fan favorite Agent Coulson are given new life in the pre-Avengers initiative world (and their bromance sparks memories of “Lethal Weapon”).
El junte de Larson y Jackson convierte a Captain Marvel en un “buddy cop movie” -pero tirando más hacia Lethal Weapon 4 que hacia Lethal Weapon – mientras persiguen a los invasores a través de una serie de secuencias de acción pobremente ejecutadas por los directores Anna Boden y Ryan Fleck, cuya carrera hasta ahora había estado enfocada en dramas tanto cinematográficos como televisivos.
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…because it does what the better Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour add-ons knew how to do: play it again with a few inventive key-changes…
If Lethal Weapon can inspire a string of sequels, shouldn’t Zootopia get at least one?
While Nick and Judy’s banter is a lot less profane (and contains a lot more shameless dad jokes) than, say, Murtaugh and Riggs from Lethal Weapon, the character dynamics are largely the same.
Chris Hemsworth goes full Mel Gibson mode à la Martin Riggs — particularly the first Lethal Weapon movie — in Netflix’s Extraction.
This might feel like a modern-day Hollywood hybrid of Man on Fire , Lethal Weapon , DOA , Terminator 2 and City of God , but it also pays more than just lip-service to its international cast.