LETHAL WEAPON (1987)

From 1989 to somewhere around 1993, I was obsessed with Mel Gibson. There are a lot of people who know me now who don't know this fact about me. But there is probably no one who knew me during those years who doesn't know this fact about me. I turned 14 in 1989, and I was 18 in 1993. The years in between were spent in intense study of all things Mel Gibson.

The obsession was due primarily to the Richard Donner-directed and Shane Black-scripted trash action classic LETHAL WEAPON. The movie was released in 1987 when I was far too young to see it. I had an older cousin who saw it, though, and he said it kicked ass. When I finally saw it, I suspected it was the greatest movie ever made. At the very least, I knew for certain that it was the greatest movie I'd ever seen.

Now I'm a 43-year-old cinephile. I've spent most of the last 25 years or so obsessed with different kinds of films and filmmakers. Film noir. Westerns. Musicals. Bogart. Welles. Bergman (both of them). Judy fucking Garland. I've probably seen, at least once, a majority of the movies that would be considered serious classics of the cinema. Many of those, I've seen more than once. A few I've seen over and over and over again.

But if I had to wager on the movie I've seen the most times, I would have to sheepishly admit it's probably LETHAL WEAPON. And, keep in mind, I've only seen it maybe once or twice in the last ten years. That means that by the mid-nineties I'd watched it, what? 50 times? 60? I watched it with the passion of youth. I watched it the way some kids in the 90s listened to Pearl Jam or Nirvana albums.

These reflections were triggered by seeing the movie for the first time in a very long time at a midnight showing at Chicago's Music Box Theater.  It was like running into a friend you haven't seen since high school.

LETHAL WEAPON is an 80s action movie. In some ways, it's the ultimate 80s action movie. DIE HARD is an infinitely better film, but it was pointing the way out of the 80s. DIE HARD had a high tech sheen to it that seemed to herald the breakthrough of something like T2: JUDGEMENT DAY. LETHAL WEAPON, on the other hand, was all about guns, tits, and mullets. LETHAL WEAPON was 80s trash and proud of it. 

This post isn't about how I watched this dated 80s action movie and realized it's trash. I think I always knew it was trash--albeit, highly efficient trash. And it's been years now since I caught up to the fact that film is casually homophobic, racist, and sexist. None of this is still surprising to me.

What is surprising is how bad Mel Gibson is in most of it. Because Mel's a good actor. His performance in BRAVEHEART is appropriately epic, while he's tightly restrained in THE ROAD WARRIOR. His HAMLET wasn't an embarrassment. His best performances are as the imperiled fathers in RANSOM, SIGNS, and THE BEAVER (a truly weird film, sure, but there's no denying that Mel taps into a deep well of self-loathing and depression in it). Mel can, when he puts his mind to it, act. Just not here. More on that in a second. 

In LETHAL WEAPON Mel plays LA cop Martin Riggs. He's suicidal because his wife has recently died, so--for reasons that make no sense whatsoever--he's transferred from narcotics to homicide. Which is sort of like getting a promotion, but never mind. He gets paired up with family man Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and they set out to solve a murder that almost immediately leads them to a gang of Vietnam-era mercenaries turned drug smugglers. Together Riggs and Murtaugh kill all these assholes and Riggs learns to live again.   

Mel doesn't so much give a performance here as much as he does a kind of macho-vogue. He's beautiful in this movie. This is prime Mel Gibson as a sex symbol, with a flared mullet sculpted by a stylist simply credited as "Ramsey". In his first shot in the movie, we find Mel naked in bed, waking up with a lit cigarette in his mouth and a loaded 9mm on the pillow beside him. He gets up and drags a beer out of the fridge. Despite being a depressive who guzzles booze for breakfast he's got about 8% body fat and a perfect ass. The camera regards him like a rock star. His hair is sculpted and so's that ass. Mel's not here to act. Mel's here to project beauty and danger. He's here to kill assholes, to run down the street barechested with a machine gun, to jump, to fight, and to kill even more assholes.

[A long digression: We'll find out in LW2 that Victoria Lynn Riggs was actually murdered by drug dealers who covered it up by making it look like a car wreck. Of course. This will allow Riggs to kill some more to purge his pain. 80s action films always argue that the surest way through personal turmoil is the wholesale slaughter of assholes. Here's the thing, though, LETHAL WEAPON itself doesn't feel like it's supposed to be a franchise starter. It feels like Shane Black set out to make a movie, rather than part one of a series. This might explain the grittiness of the original film, like its subplot about a dead porn actress, or the weird sexual tension between Riggs and Murtaugh's 16 year old daughter. None of this would fly in a film today, especially a film that could potentially kick off a billion dollar franchise.] 

Here's the thing: on one level it's weird that a 14 year old religiously indoctrinated Arkansas kid like me became obsessed with this movie. LETHAL WEAPON is an LA movie. It's very LA, in fact. (And that aspect of it really pops on the big screen as the detectives go up into the Hollywood hills.)  It's an adult movie in the sense that it has a lot of adult material: nudity, profanity, violence, suicidal despair.

But every bit of it--even the despair--is pitched at the level of an eighth grader. LETHAL WEAPON is a big rock power ballad of a movie. It's got no depth, just emotional bombast. Riggs isn't just sad, he's suicidal, and he's not just suicidal, he's SUICIDAL, with bug eyes and flared nostrils to prove it. Mel Gibson's performance in this film is about as subtle as a kick to the jaw, but that's in keeping with the tone of the movie. You can't croon a rock power ballad, you have to belt it out. The scene where Riggs almost kills himself is probably the scene that made Mel Gibson a superstar. The rest of the movie's talk of suicide rings hollow and cheap (the showdown between Riggs and Murtaugh later on-- "Don't tempt me, man!" --is overdone and unconvincing), but this almost wordless scene is just Mel and a gun and all the emotion the actor can dredge up from his soul. It's the scene that made people think "That handsome son of a bitch can emote." Riggs kills 17 assholes in this movie and everyone of them is just catharsis, the releasing of the tension of the earlier suicide scene. That's the kind of thing my 14 year old self could hold on to.

The success of this movie launched three more sequels, and while it's interesting to see how the movie shifted into a series, it's also easy to see how the filmmakers lost touch with that series. LETHAL WEAPON 2 (1989) immediately starts to turn everything into a comedy. Shane Black wanted to kill Riggs off. The suits wouldn't let him. So Shane Black was out. No more talk of suicide and no more grit. It was time to start printing money. Consequently, LW2 is still hyper-violent but it doesn't linger on pain, and there are no torture sequences like the first film. It's bigger and broader, like a cartoon. (Indeed, the film starts with the Looney Tunes fanfare.) The body count goes over the top with glee, and there's longer and larger set pieces. (Riggs pulls down a house on stilts with his truck.) The heroes end up in each other's arms, laughing. The film also introduced Joe Pesci as comic relief in a movie already popping with jokes, and that was the end of LETHAL WEAPON. The tepid LW3 brought back Pesci for no good reason (and to diminishing returns), and in an R-rated movie it gave Mel a PG-love interest in Rene Russo. It made both the violence and the humor broader, which is to say that the film is neither exciting nor funny. It also tried, paradoxically, to get serious and deliver a hamfisted gun control message in between all the shootouts glorifying guns and all the jokes making light of police brutality. And LW4...well, shit, I don't really even remember it. Jet Li was the bad guy and he gets double-teamed by Riggs and Murtaugh, which always struck me as kind of a punk move on the part of the cops. Chris Rock, just emerging as the greatest stand up comic of his generation, is also in the movie to try to give someone, anyone, a reason to see it. It's all just...bad. And Riggs has short hair. What the hell's the point of a LETHAL WEAPON movie without a mullet?  

Since Donner directed all four movies and the principal cast returned for all four, the last movie ends with a group photo to underscore the family atmosphere on the set. Yet the films themselves reveal that, cut loose from Shane Black's trash-vision, Donner didn't really know what to do with LETHAL WEAPON. As the series went on it got more and more intellectually mangled. Donner tried to turn it into a kind of family comedy (the tits and ass and torture were out by LW3), while also trumpeting simplistic liberal "messages" (apartheid is bad, guns are bad, Chinese slave labor is bad). But those messages are stuffed clumsily into what is essentially the old DIRTY HARRY stroke-fantasy of good guy fascist cops gunning down dozens of people with righteous impunity because, after all, criminals are just a bunch of remorseless assholes.

I lost interest in all of this long before the final credits rolled on the last movie. The WEAPON sequels, to one degree or another, all feel superfluous. 

The original LETHAL WEAPON is different, at least for me. It's a relic of the 80s, which is to say that it's a relic of my own childhood. Why did I love it? Because in its dumb Joel Silver-produced way, it had a sense of loneliness and isolation. I certainly felt that in my teen years. It presented uncomfortable emotions I understood and it offered hyper-masculine remedies: Toughness. Rough humor. Male bonding. Violence.

Of course, as I got older I came to learn that these weren't exactly the best remedies to uncomfortable emotions. But when I watch LETHAL WEAPON I'm certainly not looking for moral instruction. I'm not even looking for entertainment anymore because when I watch it now, I can no longer simply see a trashy 80s action movie. Instead, I see the kid watching it and learning to love the movies, falling in love with their raw speed and fury. I see a kid awkwardly learning how to move, and not to move, through the world. I see, of all things, me.

Mel Goes to Hell

I wrote about Mel Gibson earlier this year ("Mel Gibson's Face"), but I never could have guessed what a sharp, ugly, turn his life and career would take. With the internet release of four taped phone calls to his ex-girlfriend Oksana--tapes on which Gibson screams abuse, uses racist language, admits to punching her while she held their nine month-old baby and threatens to kill her--the actor/director/producer has sunk to a low that may actually surpass any movie star in recent memory. And in this squalid age that is saying one hell of a lot.

Is his career over? In a sense. He'll never be the movie star he was in the late nineties and early 2000s. Remember that is not all that long ago when Gibson was one of the two or three biggest stars on the planet, with a reputation as a god-fearing family man, a shelf of Oscars and awards, unlimited industry heft and about a billion dollars in cash and assets. What makes his story fascinating is that he's lost so much due to his own warped sense of victimization. In between calling Oksana a "bitch" and a "cunt" Gibson tells her that he divorced his wife because they weren't "spiritually compatible" (a reference to the fact that his wife never joined the Catholic church and an echo of a earlier controversy from 2003 when he told reporters that he thought she was going to hell). If one thing is clear from the Oksana tapes--besides the fact that Gibson is a rich bully and a misogynist asshole--it's his shocking sense of self-pity. How could a millionaire who has spent most of his life as an international sex symbol be so pathetic? It's difficult to believe that the man on these tapes is as powerful as Mel Gibson. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it also can't purchase much self-respect either. It turns out that Mel Gibson the man is the kind of guy that Martin Riggs or William Wallace might kick the shit out of. With this self-inflicted gunshot to the career it's highly unlikely that Gibson could hoist the heroic banner again with any plausibility.

But most of us reach an easy accommodation with the disconnect between an artist's work and personal life. Most movie geeks still love Chinatown even though Roman Polanski is a child-rapist. Woody Allen is, at best, a scum bag, but I still love Manhattan. The partial list of great artists who were horrible human beings could include Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner, and John Phillips. John Lennon beat his first wife. Joan Crawford was a terrible mother. Bing Crosby was a terrible father. And on and on.

Will there be a place for Gibson in films in the future? I'm sure there will be, though it's hard to know what it might be. No one in Hollywood can disgrace themselves out of a job anymore, so long as they're willing to shift what it is they want. His shot at being a respected elder statesman is gone, but he might find work as as a raging nutcase. He's now auditioned for that part in front of the entire world.

***

Vanity Fair has a smart piece about the Gibson meltdown by John Lopez.

And Owen Gleiberman has a good piece over at EW.

Mel Gibson's Face: Edge of Darkness (2010)

Mel Gibson has a movie star's face. When he was a young man, he was almost unnaturally handsome, but being physically attractive and having a good visage for the movies aren't the same thing. As I write this, there are literally thousands of gorgeous young men and women in Hollywood working as restaurant wait staff. They are toned, tanned, and beautiful. Perhaps someday they'll make it into a porno or maybe the television equivalent of porno, the reality show. More than likely, however, they'll keep waiting tables...because they do not have great faces.

A great face can be attractive, but it must be interesting. Part of this is craft. A good actor knows how to convey thought and emotion. Part of it, though, is luck. A movie star simply has that kind of face. Watching movies is largely the process of watching human faces, so you better have a good one if you want to be a star.

But something has happened to Mel Gibson's face as he has aged--which, I suppose, is the same as saying that something has happened to Mel Gibson. When he burst onto the scene from Australia in the late seventies and early eighties, he was the first salvo in what would become an onslaught of movie stars from Down Under. The sixth of eleven children, Gibson was born in America but moved to Australia by a father who harbored dark conspiracy theories about the world and raised his children in a kind of fundamentalist Catholicism. No one knew any of this when Gibson became a movie star in the Mad Max series. All we knew was that he combined an agile natural beauty with a rugged outdoors quality better than anyone since Robert Redford (and you might go all the way back to Gary Cooper). Perhaps because he was physically attractive, or because he was in the distinctly unmasculine profession of acting, or maybe because he really is a hairy-knuckled he-man, Gibson tended toward action roles. Early on there were successful attempts to pair him with actresses in romances (The Year of Living Dangerously, the underrated Mrs. Soffel), but when Gibson made a late career foray into the romantic comedy genre (with the lame What Women Want) it was billed as "Gibson finally makes one for the ladies", an admission that he'd spent most of his film career bashing in other men's skulls. (In cinematic terms, Gibson has spent far more time in the arms of men than women.) One reason What Women Want stinks, though, is that Gibson was too old for the part. That boyish face had spent too many days squinting in the sun, too much time absorbing beatings--or fake beatings--and it had begun to crack.

Part of this was age, of course. Redford and Cooper both lost their sheen with time, but the collapse of Gibson's beauty has been accompanied by the collapse of his public image. First came The Passion of the Christ, Gibson's gory Jesus movie, which brought attention at long last to Gibson's religious beliefs. The film was a phenomenal hit due in part to Gibson's shrewd courting of the Christian right, but its success had more to do with being the perfect film for its intended audience. It was the first fundamentalist Christian movie ever made in Hollywood. Critics who slammed the film for reducing the message of Christ to a prolonged sadomasochistic representation of his execution missed the point. In Gibson's film, the message is the man, and this viewpoint mirrors a fundamentalist reading of the story of Christ.

Which is all well and good but charges of anti-Semitism hit closer to home, especially in light of Hutton Gibson's (Mel's father) anti-Jewish rantings in books and on the Internet. Then, of course, came the infamous night when Mel was picked up for drunk driving and puked up an anti-Semitic tirade at the officer who pulled him over. An admission of alcoholism followed, but how much can you really blame your bigotry on booze? Many people wondered at the time where Mel's wife and kids were in all of this. For years, he was a famous family man, married for twenty-plus years to the same woman, with more kids than an orphanage. Why was he out drinking at a nightclub in Malibu and spewing Jewish-cabal conspiracy theories at cops? Then came the revelation that Mel--the hardcore Catholic--was getting divorced and having a child with a younger woman.

All of which is to say that Mel Gibson is destined to be the subject of a great biography some day. Most movies stars are boring. I'm not sure that people like Clooney, Pitt, or Damon are interesting enough as human beings to sustain a book, but Gibson's slowly unfolding train wreck of a life, bound up in religion and family and gender, would make for some compelling reading.

At any rate, it's been a traumatic eight years for the actor, and some fascinating things have happened to his world famous visage. One suspects Gibson always hated being a pretty boy, which is one reason, perhaps, his films form an extended meditation on the mutilation of the male body. He's spent most of his career covered in fake blood and gore (and spent his entire directorial debut in a ghoulish facial prosthetic). Combined with some homophobic outbursts over the years, this seems to be evidence of a deep ambivalence about male beauty. As he enters the older statesman period of his career, Gibson looks haggard, older if not necessarily wiser.

In his new film, a thriller called Edge of Darkness Gibson plays a Boston detective named Tom Craven who goes on a violent spree of revenge after his daughter is murdered on his doorstep. His investigation leads him to the huge nuclear research facility where his daughter worked. Her boss is a creep named Bennett (played by that increasingly valuable character actor Danny Huston). Craven is joined in his mission by a shady government operative named Jedburgh, played by Ray Winstone.

This kind of thing is right in Gibson's wheelhouse. He's spent half of his film career cradling the dead bodies of loved ones, and the other half blowing off the heads of those responsible. Somehow though, Edge of Darkness never catches fire. It's a strangely disjointed piece of work. It's not effective as a serious drama because it's not serious. The murder of Gibson's daughter, for instance, is filmed like an action scene--when she's shot she flies back through the door in a special effect flourish that would usually be intended to excite bloodlust of the audience. Yet, the film is too dour to work as a straight ahead action flick.

On that last point--although there is a lot of violence in the film it's not really the kind of violence that pits people in combat against each other. Most of the people killed in the film--whether they are good guys, bad guys, or morally ambiguous guys--are more or less murdered in cold blood. This leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Violence in action films usually works because it's situated as a life and death contest between two people. This movie mostly features unarmed people being shot to death.

At the center of it all is Gibson, back after nearly eight years away from the screen. He's gotten bulky--not it terms of fat but in terms of muscle. He seems more squat than before. His forehead is a map of deep creases and his eyes look heavy. And something weird is going on with his hair--did Mel get plugs?

I draw all this attention to Gibson's physical form because the body is the tool of the actor. His face has gone from being handsome to being something else. I'm disappointed by this movie mainly because I suspect Gibson is getting to an age where he could give the best performance of his career. Actors can get interesting as they age. Gary Cooper's beauty gave way to worry. Gable's gave way to sadness. Bogart, never beautiful, became paranoid, as did Jimmy Stewart. John Wayne just became more John Wayne, so much so that it seemed like he was never young. Cary Grant aged like a fine wine. (I've purposefully avoided talking about actresses here because there are different issues involved--for most of Hollywood's history women have been robbed of the chance to age on screen--but I'll write on that at some future point.)

Who knows what the future holds for Mel Gibson? Edge of Darkness is a failure as a film, but Gibson remains a potent screen presence. Life has put hard miles on his face and stooped his shoulders a bit; Mel's getting old. But if someone like George Clooney is hitting middle age with class and grace, Gibson is hitting it driving ninety miles an hour with a bottle of tequila in his lap. Get him in the right role, though, and that wild ass quality--that raging self-destructive mad man insanity--could be the essence of a hell of a performance.