Lethal Weapon 4 Review - Too Old for This Franchise
Lethal Weapon 4 Review: Too Old for This Franchise
Rating: 2.5/5
“I’m too old for this sh*t.” Roger Murtaugh said it in 1987. By 1998, he wasn’t the only one.
Lethal Weapon 4 is the cinematic equivalent of a band reunion tour. Everyone shows up. Everyone hits the familiar notes. The crowd cheers because they remember the songs. But somewhere between the opening jet ski chase and the fourth explosion, you realize nobody on screen — or behind the camera — had a compelling reason to make this movie other than the fact that Warner Bros. backed up a dump truck full of money to everyone’s front door.
The Plot: A Kitchen Sink of Chaos
Here’s the story, and I use that term generously. A cargo ship arrives in Los Angeles carrying Chinese immigrants being smuggled into the country by a Triad operation. There’s a counterfeiting subplot involving Chinese currency. There’s an immigration angle. There’s Murtaugh secretly sheltering a Chinese family. There’s Riggs expecting a baby with Lorna Cole. There’s Murtaugh’s daughter pregnant by Leo Getz. There’s Chris Rock playing a fast-talking detective who is somehow related to everyone.
That’s not a plot. That’s a whiteboard in a writers’ room where nobody had the courage to say “pick one.”
Director Richard Donner, who crafted the lean, mean original in 1987, apparently decided that the secret sauce for the fourth installment was more. More characters. More subplots. More explosions. More Joe Pesci. (Nobody asked for more Joe Pesci.) The result is a movie that feels like three different scripts were fed into a blender and served with a side of pyrotechnics.
Gibson and Glover: Running on Fumes and Charm
Let’s be fair. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover have genuine chemistry. It’s been the backbone of this franchise since day one, and even in this overstuffed sequel, they can make a weak scene work with a look, a joke, or a well-timed sigh. Gibson’s Riggs is slightly domesticated now — he’s got a girlfriend, a baby on the way, and marginally fewer death wishes. Glover’s Murtaugh is doing the same “I’m too old” routine, except now it’s actually true and slightly less funny.
The problem is that the movie doesn’t trust their chemistry to carry it. Instead of letting Gibson and Glover do what they do best — bicker, bond, and blow things up — the film drowns them in supporting characters and subplots. By the time we get a genuine Riggs-Murtaugh moment, we’ve already sat through Chris Rock’s standup routine, Joe Pesci’s shrieking, and what feels like eighteen separate conversations about who’s pregnant and who knows about it.
The “buddy” in buddy cop shouldn’t require a census form.
Jet Li: The Best Thing in the Wrong Movie
Here’s the thing about Jet Li as villain Wah Sing Ku: he’s genuinely terrifying. In a movie full of actors coasting on established personas, Li shows up with ice-cold intensity and fight choreography that makes everyone else look like they’re moving through pudding.
His martial arts sequences are the only scenes where Lethal Weapon 4 feels alive. The final fight between Li and Gibson has real weight to it — which is remarkable given that the script gives Li approximately four lines of dialogue and zero character motivation beyond “be menacing and Chinese.”
It was Li’s Hollywood debut, and he deserved a villain role with actual depth. Instead, the film treats him like a very skilled prop. He enters scenes, kicks people through walls with breathtaking precision, and exits. That’s his character arc. The entire thing.
Hollywood took one of the greatest martial arts actors in history and said, “Just stand there and look scary.” Brilliant.
Chris Rock and Joe Pesci: The Comedy Relief Nobody Needed
Chris Rock plays Detective Lee Butters, and his performance can be described as “Chris Rock doing Chris Rock in a movie that already has comedians.” He’s funny — of course he’s funny, he’s Chris Rock — but the movie doesn’t know how to use him. He’s got a secret romance with Murtaugh’s daughter, which is treated as a major subplot but resolved in about thirty seconds of screen time. The rest of his scenes are essentially a stand-up set with a badge.
Joe Pesci returns as Leo Getz, and I’ll say this as diplomatically as possible: Leo Getz was amusing in small doses in Lethal Weapon 2. By film four, he’s been upgraded to a full supporting role, and the “OK OK OK” routine has aged like milk left on a Phoenix sidewalk in July. Pesci gives it his all — the man doesn’t know how to phone it in — but the character has been milked dry. He’s the human equivalent of a catchphrase that stopped being funny two sequels ago.
The combined effect of Rock and Pesci is that the movie’s comedy-to-action ratio tilts so far toward comedy that the actual thriller elements feel like interruptions. “Oh right, there’s a smuggling ring. Can we get back to the baby jokes?”
The Action: Loud, Expensive, and Weightless
Lethal Weapon 4 opens with Riggs and Murtaugh confronting a guy in body armor with a flamethrower on a Los Angeles freeway. It’s spectacular, ridiculous, and sets the tone for everything that follows: this movie will throw spectacle at you until you stop asking questions.
The freeway chase? Big. The office building fight? Bigger. The highway pursuit? Even bigger. The climactic fight on a pier? The biggest.
The problem is that none of it matters. In the original Lethal Weapon, Riggs was a suicidal cop with nothing to lose, and every action scene carried genuine tension because you believed he might actually die. By film four, Riggs has survived approximately 847 near-death experiences, has a loving partner, and a baby on the way. The stakes are zero. You know he’s going to be fine. Everyone’s going to be fine. Even the furniture is going to be fine.
When action has no stakes, it’s just noise. And Lethal Weapon 4 is very, very noisy.
The 90s Action Franchise Problem
Lethal Weapon 4 is a textbook example of what happened to action franchises in the late 90s. The formula: take a great original, add characters, add spectacle, add runtime, subtract the rawness and edge that made the first one work. Repeat until the audience stops showing up.
The original Lethal Weapon was 110 minutes of two cops with real problems solving a real case. Lethal Weapon 4 is 127 minutes of a comedy ensemble occasionally remembering there’s a crime happening. The franchise didn’t decline because it ran out of ideas — it declined because it replaced ideas with volume.
See also: Die Hard after the first one. Beverly Hills Cop 3. Batman & Robin. The 90s were a graveyard of franchises that forgot why they worked.
The Verdict
Lethal Weapon 4 isn’t terrible. It’s watchable in the way that a rerun of something you used to love is watchable — comforting, familiar, and ultimately forgettable. Gibson and Glover still have it. Jet Li is magnetic. There are individual moments that remind you why this franchise mattered.
But as a whole, it’s a bloated, overstuffed farewell that mistakes more for better. It’s got more characters than it can serve, more subplots than it can resolve, and more explosions than it can justify. It’s a movie that’s too old for this — but unlike Murtaugh, it never has the self-awareness to admit it.
Final Score: 2.5/5 — Watch it for the nostalgia. Just don’t expect the lightning.
Who Should Watch This
- Fans of the franchise: Obviously. It’s the last ride. You’ll enjoy the callbacks even if the movie disappoints.
- Jet Li completists: His Hollywood debut is worth seeing, even in a weaker movie.
- 90s action nostalgia seekers: If you miss the era of VHS rentals and Blockbuster Friday nights, this’ll scratch the itch.
Who Should Skip This
- Anyone who hasn’t seen the first three: Start with the original. It’s actually great.
- People with low tolerance for Joe Pesci: You’ve been warned.
- Anyone expecting the edge of the original: That ship sailed in 1989.
