Lethal Weapon 3

Annotation for KRRR! 2018 by Robert Krčmář

Lethal Weapon 3, as the title suggests, is the third installment of the now legendary action series. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover return as Martin Riggs and Richard Murtaugh, two detectives from Los Angeles. Detective Murtaugh wants to serve his time in peace, as he is only a few days away from retirement, but a coincidence means that he will definitely not see a peaceful retirement. The film was once again directed by Richard Donner, who not only directed all the other parts of this series, but also directed Superman (1978) and the horror film Satan is Coming! (1976). The main driving force of the film is once again the relationship between the two main characters and their mutual confrontation. Lethal Weapon has transformed from the somewhat announced but relatively serious first film, through the somewhat lighter second part, into a regular action comedy with several dramatic moments. Humor has become dominant, which is also helped by the return of Leo Getz in the role of Joe Pesci. It is thanks to him that the film is even more unrestrained and Donner can afford to work with more naive methods in the development of the narrative without them seeming inappropriate. Many long scenes do not advance the narrative in any way and are present only for their own humor and to make the relationship of the central pair stand out more. Although the film sometimes becomes more of a sequence of separate scenes connected by donkey bridges, this is masked in the vortex of their humor.

Although the action scenes have decreased since the second part, the two car chases present will be removed from the seventy-millimeter copy on the big screen. As a replacement for the action scenes, we also get a romance between Riggs and Sergeant Lorna Cole in the role of Rene Russo, which definitively makes the individual interactions between the characters – and not only between the central duo – more important than the detective plot itself. Richard Donner thus further emphasizes the subgenre of so-called "buddy movies", which he himself helped develop and which achieves dynamism through a pair of characters, often with different personalities, who are forced to work together despite their differences.