Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Danny Glover was forty-two when Lethal Weapon 2 opened in July 1989. The first film had transformed him from a respected character actor (Witness, The Color Purple, Places in the Heart) into a leading man whose name appeared above the title alongside Mel Gibson. The two years between the films included Bat21* (1988), a return to Saturday Night Live hosting, and a growing public profile as an activist on housing, education, and South African divestment.

Murtaugh of LW2 is the partner who pulls the trigger

The structural payload of LW2 lands on Glover's shoulders rather than Gibson's. Riggs hunts and kills Vorstedt,b35 but the film's structural antagonist is Arjen Rudd — and Rudd is killed by Murtaugh, on his own authority, with a single shot that voids the diplomatic-immunity claim the entire film has been constructed around. The line "It's just been revoked" is Glover's, not Gibson's.b36 Donner has said in interviews that the casting decision behind the line was deliberate.

"Mel could have shot Rudd, but it had to be Danny. The whole movie is about the by-the-book half deciding the rules don't apply anymore. If Riggs pulls that trigger it's just another vendetta. When Murtaugh pulls it, the institution is killing itself." — Richard Donner, Empire oral history (2017)

Glover plays the line dry, almost throwaway. The dock is dark, Riggs is bleeding out, Rudd has just announced "Diplomatic immunity!" — and Glover delivers the answer the way a man finishes a sentence someone else started.

Apartheid was not abstract for Glover

Glover had been a public anti-apartheid activist since the late 1970s. He participated in divestment protests at the University of California, marched at the South African embassy, and supported the Free South Africa Movement. His casting in a film whose antagonists are South African consular officials with diplomatic immunity was politically pointed in 1989 — the apartheid regime would still be in place for another five years, and Nelson Mandela would not be released from prison until February 1990, seven months after LW2 opened.

"I had been on the picket line in front of that consulate. I had been arrested in front of that consulate. To play a cop who walks through those gates with a gun was not abstract for me." — Danny Glover, The New York Times (1989)

The protest scene in which Murtaugh joins demonstrators outside the consulate uses real anti-apartheid placards, real chants ("Free South Africa, you son of a bitch"), and was filmed at a soundstage standing in for the actual Los Angeles consular site.b17 (See Krugerrands and South-African-Apartheid-Era Cinema.)

The toilet-bomb scene as star sequence

The bathroom sequence — Murtaugh sitting on a pressure-triggered bomb for five minutes of screen time while Riggs and the bomb squad rig a tub harness — is structured around Glover's face.b15 b16 The camera holds on him through the comic and the terrifying registers; the joke ("I'm gonna die on the toilet") and the mortal stakes share the same frame. Glover's choice to play it straight rather than mug for laughs is what makes the sequence land.

"Glover plays the bomb scene as a man who has decided to keep his dignity even if it kills him. That choice is the whole sequence. If he plays it for laughs the scene is a sketch; he plays it as a man trying to die well." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1989)

What followed

LW2 confirmed Glover's leading-man status. The 1990s included Predator 2 (1990), Grand Canyon (1991), Bopha! (1993, directed by Morgan Freeman, a film about apartheid), To Sleep with Anger (1990, for Charles Burnett), and The Color of Friendship (2000). He returned for Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), and his "I'm too old for this shit" running line became one of the franchise's most quoted catchphrases.

His activism continued. In 2003 he accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pan African Film Festival and used the speech to call for divestment from companies still doing business with the apartheid-successor regime. In 2008 the SAG-AFTRA presidential campaign in which he ran was openly built around his political work.

Cross-Film Connections

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