Plot Summary (Lethal Weapon) Lethal Weapon (1987)
Lethal Weapon is set across the Christmas season in Los Angeles. Two LAPD detectives — one a fifty-year-old family man, the other a recently widowed narc with a death wish — are partnered against their will and pulled into a Vietnam-era heroin conspiracy run by a unit of mercenaries called Shadow Company. The case begins as the apparent suicide of a young woman and ends, eight days later, as a hand-to-hand fight on a suburban front lawn.
Christmas Eve opens with a body on a parked car
A young woman in a Hollywood high-rise apartment snorts a line of cocaine, walks to her balcony, and steps off.b1 Her body lands on a Cadillac as Christmas lights blink along the city block. The film's opening is wordless, the woman is unnamed, and the case the rest of the film will investigate has been delivered before the title card.
The next morning, Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) turns fifty in a master bathroom full of his family — wife Trish, daughter Carrie, son Nick — singing happy birthday over a cake while he sits in the tub.b2 At LAPD Robbery-Homicide an hour later, the squad ribs him for the half-century mark and a phone call comes in from a man Murtaugh hasn't spoken to in years. Michael Hunsaker (Tom Atkins) — a Vietnam buddy — asks Murtaugh to look into something for him.b3 The favor goes on the calendar before either man knows the favor and the body on the Cadillac are the same case.
Riggs is introduced eating his own gun
Across town, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) wakes alone in a beach trailer with his German shepherd, drinks a beer for breakfast, sits on the unmade bed with a wedding photograph of his dead wife Victoria Lynn and his service revolver, and puts the barrel in his mouth.b4 He weeps and lowers the gun. The dog is the only witness. The film has now established the case (the jumper) and its two co-leads — the family man at the kitchen table and the suicidal narc in the trailer — without ever placing them in the same room.
The desk sergeant brings Murtaugh a routine list. The jumper from the night before is named Amanda Hunsaker — Michael Hunsaker's daughter.b5 Murtaugh phones Hunsaker back to deliver the news. Captain Murphy hands him the dossier on his new partner — ex-Special-Forces, recently transferred from narcotics, wife killed in a car crash, flagged psychologically as a suicidal "lethal weapon."b8 Murtaugh objects. The captain holds. Riggs, in undercover hair and a thrift-store jacket, has spent the same morning shooting his way out of a cocaine deal at a Christmas-tree lot.b7
The trailer scene makes the partnership mutual
The two meet in the captain's office and almost shoot each other in the comic mistake the dossier predicted; Murtaugh's I'm too old for this shit tag lands here for the first time.b9 Murtaugh and Riggs drive to Hunsaker's house to deliver the news in person; Hunsaker breaks, names the war debt — La Drang Valley. Saved my life — and Murtaugh agrees to take the case personally.b11 A jumper threatens to leap from a Hollywood roof. Riggs walks out on the ledge, handcuffs himself to the man's wrist, and steps off; both land in an inflatable airbag below. Murtaugh, furious, follows Riggs back to his beach trailer to finish the argument.b12
What happens next is the structural Trailer Confrontation of the film. Riggs reaches under the trailer floor and produces a hollow-point bullet — a special one, with a hollow point. The hollow point's so I don't blow the back of my head off. The job, he tells Murtaugh, is the reason he hasn't used it yet. He hands Murtaugh his service weapon and dares him to pull the trigger if he thinks the suicidal-narc story is a pension play. Murtaugh refuses. Riggs takes the gun back. The two go to lunch.b13 Before this scene, the partnership was administrative; after it, the men are committed to each other and to the case.
Meanwhile at General Peter McAllister's (Mitchell Ryan) poolside compound, Joshua (Gary Busey) is introduced as McAllister's enforcer. To prove the unit's discipline to a heroin client, McAllister asks Joshua for his bare arm and applies a butane lighter flame to it. Joshua does not flinch.b10 The antagonist is established as Riggs's mirror — both men calibrate their lethality through self-mortification — long before the protagonists know the antagonist exists.
The case turns from a homicide into a war
The autopsy on Amanda turns up a name and a Beverly Hills address.b14 Riggs improvises a hostage situation at the address, takes the suspect at gunpoint, and the two men crash through a window into the pool below.b15 That night Murtaugh brings Riggs home for dinner; Riggs meets Trish's cooking, eldest daughter Rianne, and the rest of the family.b16 The connection plot tracks alongside the case plot. The next lead — a hooker named Dixie who poisoned Amanda's stash — sends them to a quiet residential block where children on a porch chant you're gonna bust Dixie as the cops cross the lawn and the house detonates in a mercury-switched front-door bomb.b18
The bomb-squad technician sifting the wreckage reads the device as professional-grade — mercury switches of the kind the CIA used to issue to mercenaries during the war. A six-year-old witness named Alfred describes a man with a Special Forces tattoo. Riggs names the level: real pros, not amateurs.b19 At Amanda's memorial service that day, Murtaugh confronts Hunsaker on the lawn of the hilltop house and presses him until he breaks. Hunsaker walks Murtaugh through it: the case goes back to the war, to the CIA front Air America, and to a mercenary unit called Shadow Company. He is ready to give names. A Shadow Company helicopter (Delta One) crests the bluff and Joshua kills Hunsaker with a single rifle shot before the operational specifics land.b21 The case re-specifies in one bounded scene from a homicide investigation to a Vietnam-era conspiracy, and the witness is silenced. (See The Hunsaker Memorial Helicopter Kill.)
From this midpoint forward, Riggs's lethality is being aimed at Shadow Company rather than at himself. Murtaugh treats it as an asset rather than a liability. Riggs gives chase the moment Hunsaker drops; the helicopter pulls Joshua out before Riggs can close.b22 McAllister phones Joshua: turn up the heat.b24 The next afternoon Riggs is alone on a Los Angeles sidewalk working a hooker for information about Dixie when Joshua opens fire from a passing car. Riggs goes down. Murtaugh reaches him; Riggs is breathing. You wore your vest. That was smart, kid.b25 Two inches higher and the round would have been a head shot — the suicide-by-job approach would have produced a corpse. The new approach has put a vest on the man.
The kidnapping forces the climax onto Murtaugh's lawn
Joshua's team grabs Rianne off the residential block in front of the Murtaugh house in daylight.b27 The phone rings: Joshua, with a proof-of-life and a meet at the Victorville dry lake at sunrise.b28 Riggs and Murtaugh prep weapons and drive out to the desert. The handoff fails — Murtaugh's grenade-bluff turns out to be a smoker, a Shadow Company sniper takes Riggs (apparently dead), and Murtaugh and Rianne are taken alive into a Shadow Company van bound for the city.b29
Riggs is alive — the dry-lake "kill" was incomplete — and he wakes hung by the wrists from a basement crossbeam in a Hollywood Boulevard nightclub, soaked, wired, and worked over by Endo, the unit's torture specialist, on an industrial electric-shock rig.b30 In the next room Joshua is beating Murtaugh. The torture sequence is patient and graphic. Riggs dislocates his own shoulder to slip the wrist chains, drops onto Endo and kills him with a chokehold against the rig, moves through the nightclub killing the guards, and frees Murtaugh and Rianne.b31 The same lethality Riggs has been auditioning to die with is here used to extract the man and the daughter. The lawn fight that follows will replay this on home ground.
Joshua bolts. Riggs and Murtaugh pursue McAllister onto a downtown Los Angeles street. Murtaugh shoots the General through the windshield; the car flips, the grenades inside cook off, McAllister dies in the explosion.b32 Murtaugh commandeers a sergeant's car and names the next move — my home, man. The son of a bitch knows where I live.b33 The structure is now committed: the climax will be on the lawn from the dinner scene, and the realization comes from the family man, not from the suicide-cop.
The lawn fight, the bullet, the door
LAPD has cordoned the Murtaugh residential street by the time the partners arrive. Joshua rolls up at the same moment from another direction. Riggs declares the arrest his and steps onto the grass. Joshua meets him bare-handed. The fight is brutal — neither man uses his sidearm, neither man asks for help — and the watching ring of officers chants break his neck.b35a Riggs gets Joshua in a chokehold and could finish him. He releases. The arresting officers move in to cuff Joshua, who breaks the hold and snatches one of their service revolvers. Riggs and Murtaugh fire together. Joshua drops on the lawn.b36 Murtaugh's line — get that shit off my lawn — closes the action. (See The Lawn Fight.)
The film's wind-down is on Christmas Eve. Riggs visits his wife's grave and says goodbye.b37 Trish phones with an invitation to Christmas dinner; Riggs declines.b38 He arrives at the Murtaugh doorstep anyway and hands Trish the hollow-point bullet from the trailer scene. Tell him I won't be needing it anymore.b39 He turns to leave. Murtaugh shouts him back from the porch — if Riggs thinks he's eating the world's lousiest Christmas turkey alone, he's crazy. I'm not crazy. I know. The dog and the family cat begin their standoff over a turkey on the kitchen floor as Riggs steps inside.b40 The film ends on a freeze of the unit Riggs has joined.