MEMORIES:
Mikey remembers...What can I say about this movie. Why break something up when it continues to work for you. Although the ... More »
Posted on 02/08/08
CATCH PHRASE:
Joel Silver shelled out a little over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in order to blow up Orlando’s old city hall for the film’s opening sequence. And for the film’s climactic battle, the production filmed at an actual real estate project on the condition that they tear down the whole site (the developers had run out of money). So it was that the third installment in the Lethal Weapon franchise both came in and went out with a very realistic bang. For the third act, the dynamic duo of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover returned with Richard Donner directing and Joe Pesci once again reprising his role as Leo Getz. Adding to the legacy this time around was Rene Russo as the tough-as-nails Internal Affairs investigator Lorna Cole. But as usual, the weight of the film rested on the comedic talents of veterans Gibson and Glover.
After bumbling a bomb threat, Riggs and Murtaugh are demoted to traffic patrol just one week before Murtaugh’s retirement. But true to the formula, their assignment puts them in the right place at the right time as Riggs and Murtaugh are on hand to complicate an armored car robbery. But the shocking discovery comes when they find out that the criminals were using “cop killers,” armor piercing bullets. Matters only seem to worsen when an Internal Affairs agent shows up, charged to investigate possible corruption in the department. What starts out as a rocky relationship becomes a romantic entanglement as Riggs and Cole discover a mutual fondness for scars, guns, and each other.
With the two sides working different angles, they discover that the culprit is Jack Travis (Stuart Wilson), an ex-cop who’s been getting arms and drugs from the police impound. With Travis’s guns making their way into the hands of neighborhood kids, the stakes become personal for Riggs and Murtaugh. Storming Travis’s real estate development, this time with the help of agent Cole, Riggs and Murtaugh bring down the corrupt Travis and his band of “cop-killers.”
