Lethal Weapon (1987) on Netflix
R19871h 50mActionCrimeThriller
Martin Riggs, a volatile ex-Special Forces detective grieving his wife, is partnered with Roger Murtaugh, a Los Angeles police sergeant. Their first case is the death of Amanda Hunsaker.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.6/10298,867 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Los Angeles police sergeant Roger Murtaugh has just turned 50, and Captain Ed Murphy hands him a new partner: Martin Riggs, a former Special Forces soldier whose erratic, suicidal behavior has followed his wife's death in a 1984 car crash. Murtaugh is a homicide detective with a wife, Trish, and children at home; Riggs does not want a partner, and Murtaugh dislikes working in pairs. During the Christmas season, Murtaugh's old Vietnam comrade Michael Hunsaker asks him for help with his daughter Amanda. Before the two men can meet her, she dies in a fall from an apartment balcony, and the new partners are assigned the case.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Lethal Weapon (1987)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael Biehn came close to playing Riggs after Richard Donner admired him in The Terminator, but he was already tied up on Aliens; Christopher Lambert and Christopher Reeve were both approached and were not interested.
- Shane Black's first draft ran 140 pages and was far darker, ending with a helicopter chase and a truck full of cocaine exploding over the Hollywood Hills so that cocaine snowed onto the Hollywood sign. Black hated it and threw it out before picking it up again and rewriting it.
- Danny Glover got Murtaugh because casting director Marion Dougherty noticed the script never specified the character's ethnicity and proposed pairing him with Gibson. She flew Gibson in from Sydney and Glover from Chicago, where he was appearing in a play, to read together.
- The villain Mr. Joshua went to Gary Busey because he asked to read for it. An Oscar-nominated star since The Buddy Holly Story, Busey had not auditioned for years and was in a career slump; he later credited Lethal Weapon with reviving his stardom.
- Riggs's fighting style was assembled from three unusual martial arts: Gibson and Busey were taught capoeira by Cedric Adams, jailhouse rock by Dennis Newsome and Brazilian jiu-jitsu by Rorion Gracie, training four hours a day for six weeks between scenes.
- Michael Kamen got the job because editor Stuart Baird had cut the film to his Edge of Darkness music as a temp score. Kamen brought in Eric Clapton, his collaborator on that BBC series, to play the guitar part of Riggs's theme; the film version of Edge of Darkness later starred Mel Gibson.
- A different opening and a different ending were both shot. Riggs was first introduced drinking in a bar and flooring thugs, which Donner swapped for the trailer scene, and an alternate ending had Riggs telling Murtaugh not to retire before Donner settled on friendship, with no thought of sequels.
