Lethal Weapon is what happens when a good screenwriter writes his first script

Blender Dumbass
August 03, 2025

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Directed by Richard Donner ( Superman, The Goonies ) from a script of Shane Black, Lethal Weapon is a film about cops. On the surface there is no concept to the movie what so ever. It is just simply a regular, straight forward police bromance. Yet somehow the movie moves.

This film is the first ever film written by Shane Black. He did write a script called The Shadow Company which as far I know was never produced. But the first film that was produced, that he had written is in fact Lethal Weapon. Later Black will write kick-ass film-scripts gaining himself a reputation of a kick-ass Hollywood screen-writer. And eventually will graduate into film-directors. Making films like The Nice Guys and Iron Man 3.

What makes this movie in particular work is in fact Shane Black's kick-ass writing. He goes all the way clever with every trick he can come up with to make a movie which makes you constantly ask "what will happen next?", without inventing anything high-concept.

The movie starts strong with a by the book hook. We see an amazing shot directed by Donner of a camera that flies around a building and then voyeuristicly peeks into one of the windows. Where you see a lady flashing her tits. She dies within the next minute or so.

And then, Black's script becomes a bit amateurish, yet he knows, somehow that the stuff he was going to write isn't any good. So he makes it interesting. It seems like his brain pushed him into starting the film with a person waking up and brushing teeth and going to work and stuff. Stuff that you see in a lot of student films, because for some reason every single filmmaker thinks it is worth people's time to remind them how the day starts.

Black sort of does it twice with the two main characters of the movie. Yet with Roger ( Danny Glover ) he cuts right to him having a morning bath with a very weird scene, of his whole family walking in on him bathing. And then proceeds to show their morning. Which might feel amateurish, but he does sneak in a few setups into the morning sequence and otherwise invents unique elements found only in this morning sequence. And then with Martin ( Mel Gibson ) he shows the contrast of their life-styles. And therefor establishes the main character dynamics of the film.

I do think, today's Black would have cut those two morning sequences completely out of the picture. And instead would have found all of the ways to establish all of the things those sequences establish in some other ways. But come on. It's his first movie. Let him have it.

The direction of Richard Donner was not as good as I would hope. Knowing his work on films like The Goonies I know he can do better. Or maybe the involvement of Steven Spielberg with The Goonies made the film better? I mean, there are stories of Spielberg being a bit pushy, almost to a point where he completely directed the films himself, when he produced them in the 80s. Maybe the majority of the good stuff in The Goonies was Spielberg and not Donner. I don't really know.

There are cool moments of direction in Lethal Weapon, like the opening shot. But on the whole the movie feels rather uninteresting when it comes to directing. It is not terribly directed. The film works very well. It's just that the direction is not interesting most of the time. You kind of forget about the director and just watch people do stuff. Very well written stuff.

There is one setup in the film that feels like it was forgotten or something. It is the boat one of the characters has. We establish that the character has a boat. And it feels like by the end of the movie the boat will be used. But no. There is no usage of it anywhere.

Lethal Weapon was an interesting movie. And I do understand why it spawned a bazillion sequels. Yet in some aspects I still think it could be better.

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