Would you believe, Riggs and Murtagh just got jumped over lieutenant to captain? That’s right — these two walking catastrophes are now captains in the LAPD. And for good reason! They have destroyed so much property that the police department can no longer get anyone to carry their insurance. As captains, their superiors believe (with fingers crossed), they will no doubt settle into the ordinary, sedate, office-bound lives of higher-ranking officers, getting fat and slothful on police food (usually round, with a cream or raspberry filling).

Of course they will!

As usual, the opening scene is unrelated to anything else in the movie; Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtagh (Danny Glover) are first to arrive on a scene where some wacko in an armored suit is using an assault rifle and flamethrower to level a city block, and we get to see, almost immediately, (a) Murtagh dancing around in the rain, dressed only in his red-heart-spotted briefs and flapping his arms like a chicken ⁽¹⁾, and (b) Riggs blowing up a fuel tanker and destroying three or four city blocks.

Cut to nine months later. Murtagh and Riggs both have problems; Murtagh’s daughter Rianne is on the point of giving birth, father unknown, and Riggs’s gal-friendo policewoman Lorna Cole (Rene Russo) is also on the point of giving birth, father only too well known. The two men are out in Murtagh’s boat late at night discussing their various problems while obnoxious hanger-on Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) wrestles with a shark he just caught. Abruptly, a decrepit Chinese freighter appears off the port side, steaming toward shore, and its crew starts shooting at Murtagh and Riggs. I’d probably do the same, but Murtagh and Riggs take it badly, and single-handedly (well, one hand each) wipe out most of the freighter’s crew. When it grounds, we discover, along with the INS and the LAPD, that its holds are full of a couple of hundred Chinese wannabe immigrants who preferred two weeks stuffed in the stinking hold of a ship manned by a crew of bloodthirsty degenerate criminals, with only one toilet among them, to standing in the lines outside the visa office of the local U.S. consulate. Believe it or not, if they really wanted to get here their choice was probably the wise one. ⁽²⁾ It’s at this point, by the way, that we meet Murtagh’s bete noir (no pun intended) Inspector Lee Butters (Chris Rock), an enthusiastic and dedicated young police officer with a degree in psychology and an inexplicable and almost fawning respect for Murtagh, which Murtagh can understand as meaning only one thing (“This is not,” says Riggs, “the military,” meaning that you can “ask and tell”). Murtagh is, of course, wrong.

Aboard the ship, hiding in a lifeboat under canvas, is the Hong family, whom Murtagh — identifying them with his own distant ancestors brought here involuntarily from Africa — sneaks past the INS and takes into his own home. Bad move. This gets him and Riggs involved with a shadowy scheme involving: the Hong Kong triads; a grandfatherly restaurateur named Uncle Benny whose menu consists of kung pao chicken, smack, egg fu yung, horse, mushu pork, and coke (not the liquid kind); a mysterious young stranger named Wah Sing Ku (Jet Li) who is as handsome — and deadly — as a coral snake; and somebody’s forefathers (though part of the word may be misspelled). In the process of figuring out what’s going on, we get cars being run into by trains and exploding (twice), a chase over the roofs of Los Angeles’ Chinatown (Riggs is getting old, it appears; the chase does not work out well for him), a marvelous freeway demolition derby, several flip-through-the-air-and-kick demonstrations of martial arts virtuosity, and an amusing side-scene in a dentist’s office where Riggs, Murtagh and Butters, with the help of one of Leo Getz’s scams, are going to torment Uncle Benny into providing them with necessary information but everybody ends up taking a bit too much nitrous oxide. We also get all the explosions, fires and property damage we could possibly want; evidently promoting these two guys isn’t going to help L.A. all that much (Murtagh is going to have to rebuild his house yet again!). And, oh yes, all baby problems are resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, with the help of the nitrous oxide and a conveniently passing rabbi (though Murtagh will probably continue to grumble a bit for years to come).

This was a fun film, if you overlook the occasional inanities (cars and tanker trucks do not blow up quite as easily or as spectacularly as the makers of this film series presume) and the so-called “adult language” (I know of no adult in the English-speaking world who says the “F”-word quite as frequently as just about everybody in this film — I didn’t count, but would guess that it was slightly more common than “the” or “a” in the dialogue). Much of the fun is in the give-and-take between Riggs and Murtagh, though over the course of four films Murtagh has come to be less exasperated with Riggs than he once was, and Riggs has lost (again, because of advancing age) some of his mad wildness (though Stephanie, the department psychologist, apparently doesn’t believe so ^[3]). Murtagh’s family plays a role more in the background than it has in previous films; Riggs’s dead wife, as usual, plays a background but important role, and shows us a side of Leo Getz that we haven’t seen before. Careful viewers can learn at least one important Chinese term that will stand them in good stead when they visit China: ren min bi. If you like the National Rifle Association and oppose gun control, keep your eyes shut during all the scenes inside the police department. Jet Li gets to strut his martial arts stuff somewhat more freely than Michelle Yeoh was allowed to do in the recent Tomorrow Never Dies (but then he’s trying to kill everybody, while Yeoh’s main purpose was not to overshadow her partner Bond).

Overall, enjoyable if not over-pretentious. Now I’ve got to go back and look at the first three again.

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⁽¹⁾I told my son David that this was why Murtagh was allowed to use so much fowl language in the film. David was not appreciative of this explanation.

⁽²⁾ I speak from bitter experience. In 1989 my wife and I invited the young son of my friend Mingchi in Shanghai to come visit with us for a year. The stumbling block was the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai. He’s finally arriving in the United States — next Saturday.

⁽³⁾ Stephanie, at one point, loses her cool and publicly, if unprofessionally, upbraids Riggs. He gives her reason to regret this.

Don Harlow, July 11, 1998 09:12 AM

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