Critical Reception and Legacy (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
The summer of 1989 received it as the best of the action sequels
Lethal Weapon 2 opened on July 7, 1989, into a summer that included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Ghostbusters II, License to Kill, Star Trek V, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It was a sequel summer — most of the major releases were the second or third installment of an existing franchise — and LW2 was widely cited at the time as the best of the action sequels.
"Lethal Weapon 2 is one of those rare sequels that's actually better than the original. The action is faster, the comedy is funnier, the partnership is deeper, and the new villains — diplomats with immunity who can't be touched — give the film a structural problem the original didn't have." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1989)
"If sequels were being graded this summer — and they are — Lethal Weapon 2 is at the top of the class. Mr. Donner and the writers Jeffrey Boam and Shane Black have figured out how to escalate without inflating, how to make the second hour of a story without losing the first." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1989)
"There is a giddiness to the second film that the first did not entirely earn. Donner is in his pocket. Gibson is loose. Glover is funny in a way the first film did not let him be. And Pesci is the third Lethal Weapon nobody knew the franchise needed." — Variety review, Variety (1989)
The box office confirmed the reviews. LW2 grossed $20 million in its opening weekend and finished with $147 million domestic and $80 million internationally — a $227 million worldwide total against a $25 million budget, more than doubling LW1's worldwide gross. (box office mojo)
The apartheid context drew political attention
The South-African-consulate antagonists made LW2 a more politically charged film than the action-sequel category usually accommodated. The Anti-Apartheid Movement issued a statement praising the film for naming apartheid in a mainstream commercial context. South Africa's apartheid government banned the film domestically, citing "anti-South African content."
"It is genuinely surprising that a major Hollywood action film in 1989 has named apartheid by name. The diplomatic-immunity premise is a story decision but it is also a moral one. The villains aren't generic 'foreigners' — they are the legal mechanism the apartheid regime has been using to evade accountability for two decades." — The New York Times Film View column, The New York Times (1989)
Danny Glover, an active anti-apartheid organizer since the late 1970s, became the public face of the film's political dimension in interviews. The protest scene outside the consulate uses real anti-apartheid placards and chants. (See Krugerrands and South-African-Apartheid-Era Cinema.)
Critics noted the midpoint as the structural innovation
Several reviewers identified the trailer-chair Vicki re-disclosure scene as the film's structural innovation, even when they didn't have terminology for what it was doing.
"The strangest and best scene in the film is when Vorstedt tells Riggs he killed his wife. The scene comes too early to be a climax and too late to be exposition. It is the moment the entire first hour of the film retroactively rewrites itself. I cannot think of another action sequel that does this." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1989, archived)
The line "It's just been revoked" was identified almost immediately as one of the most quotable lines of the year. By 1990 it had entered the franchise's quote-culture in the same way "I'm too old for this shit" had from LW1.
The legacy across the franchise
LW2 set the template the franchise followed for the next decade. Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) reduced the political dimension and added Rene Russo's Lorna Cole as Riggs's love interest. Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) added Chris Rock and Jet Li, expanded the family, and aged the partners into late middle age. Donner directed all four; Gibson, Glover, Pesci, Kahan, Trainor, and the Murtaugh family appeared in all four.
The four-film franchise is widely considered one of the most consistent action-comedy series in American cinema. Most of the consistency derives from LW2's decision to retain the LW1 department heads and extend rather than escalate.
"Most action franchises break in the second or third film. Lethal Weapon broke in the fourth and only barely. The reason is that the second film figured out how to make a sequel without abandoning the first, and the third and fourth films inherited that template." — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle retrospective (2018)
Awards and home-video life
LW2 was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Effects Editing (Robert G. Henderson, Alan Robert Murray). It won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Motion Picture (1990). It received an MTV Movie Award for Best Action Sequence retrospectively in 1992 (the toilet bomb).
The film has been continuously in print on home video since 1989: VHS in 1989, LaserDisc in 1990, DVD in 1997 (with director's commentary by Donner), HD-DVD and Blu-ray in 2007, and 4K UHD in 2020. (See Physical Media Releases (Lethal Weapon 2).)