LETHAL WEAPON 4 (62)

Directed by: Richard Donner

Starring: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Chris Rock, Jet Li, Rene Russo

The Pitch: Riggs and Murtaugh up against an illegal-immigrant smuggling racket. Or something.

Theo Sez: Pell-mell (or Mel), an undiscriminating grab-bag that's actually a change from the usual sleek summer-movie vehicle - more a raucous agglomeration of borrowed bits and pieces chugging noisily (but, in fact, quite entertainingly) to a pile-up of climaxes. It's all over the place, veering from bone-crunching violence to sentimental comedy, from clever puns to puerile toilet humour, from the near-elegaic to the cheerfully anarchic (property damage is "therapeutic", explains Riggs), mixing good liberal digs at the NRA and restrictive immigration policies with rampant homophobia and gags about Orientals coming up to your knees. Gibson seems finally to have moulded this series in his image - a man of action who can afford to seem a little goofy (indeed, who makes goofiness part of his virility), joky irreverence masking a thorough conservatism - and certainly the film seems to take its commitment to "family values" seriously, even suggesting a family of film-makers in the final credits (with Joel Silver at its head, no less!), and treating the various familiar characters as amiably eccentric uncles. There's a likeably thrown-together vibe to it, not particularly bothered about being "cool" (haven't seen laughing-gas used for gags since Inspector Clouseau's day) or about stopping the action for extended, semi-improvised riffs of our two heroes bickering about the difference between "zealous" and "jealous" (at times it feels more like a Woody Allen movie). Exposition is an unknown concept here - we just move from highlight to highlight - but at least the highlights aren't always (or even usually) what you'd expect ; it's not much of a movie, but at least it doesn't feel machine-made. Though it probably is.