Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Mel Gibson’s Detective Martin Riggs and Danny Glover’s Detective Roger Murtaugh return two years later in order to do what was fashionable for sequels at the time, that being more or less the same thing again but cranked up a bit.
Here the duo stumble into a plot involving the smuggling of krugerrands, going all the way up to South African consul-general Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and his attack dog, security agent Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O’Connor). Warned off the case – diplomatic immunity, don’t you know – and assigned babysitting duties for Joe Pesci’s federally protected witness, Leo Getz, most famous of course for his snappy catchphrase, “anything you desire, Leo acquires”, I think it was. I may be remembering that wrong.
Naturally, the lads cannot stop sniffing around the case, with Leo in tow, leading to, well the sort of conflicts, chases and quips that you’d expect from a sequel to Lethal Weapon.
It’s a solid sequel, and enjoyable on its own terms. It’s not as good as the original for all of the decidedly unoriginal reasons, most of them common to any film series studios have decided should become a franchise. The character developments of Shane Black’s unfilled script for the project is largely jettisoned in favour of keeping Riggs and Murtaugh much the same, but with some of the rougher edges filed off for a more mass market appeal, but there’s more than enough chemistry between Gibson and Glover for that not to be too big of an issue.
Its primary problem is a need to be seen to turn up the dials a bit from the original, with mixed success. The Afrikaner villains are luxuriously hateful, but the perceived need to tie in to Riggs’ past is a bridge too far in a series that admittedly was never too high on the believability index, but coupled with the killing of off half of the duo’s barely mentioned detective colleagues and short schrifted love interest Patsy Kensit, and maybe this envelope cannot quite cope with this degree of pushing.
There’s certainly worse cases of sequelitis – indeed we’ll get to one of them – and this has maintained much of the charm, chemistry and kinetics of the first film so it’s a pretty enjoyable watch.