July 9–16, 1998

movie shorts

Lethal Weapon 4

Hard to believe anyone was really clamoring for a fourth installment in the series, but here it is, bigger than life and accordingly ugly. Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) are back as the lovable psychotic and the lovable bumbler, and Joe Pesci and Rene Russo make return engagements from Nos. 2 and 3. The new elements, such as they are, consist of Chris Rock as a well-dressed, overly enthusiastic detective and Hong Kong action star Jet Li as the villain, a mostly silent menace whose bad deeds include counterfeiting money, smuggling illegal aliens into the country, and wearing too much black. As with the other films in the series, director Richard Donner distastefully mixes slapstick humor with morbid violence, and although one or two of the several thousand action sequences does elicit a mild rise, it's not nearly enough to hold your attention through the film's considerable length (something on the order of a thousand hours, although I didn't check my watch so I can't be sure). Rock brings a little life to the proceedings by clumsily injecting material from his standup act (you can tell the screenwriters didn't come up with it, because it's, you know, funny), and Li does a flying spin kick like nobody's business, which is what seeing Lethal Weapon 4 should be.

—Sam Adams