The Just-Been-Revoked Climax (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

Protagonist	Martin Riggs (with Roger Murtaugh closing)
Mission	Take Rudd's diplomatically-shielded operation down despite the shield — with the institutional partner endorsing the lethal closure
Runtime	114m
Climax	beat 36b · 106m · 93% into film
Wind-down	beats 37–40 · 107m–114m · 7m long
Resolution type	validation

The climax

Riggs has hunted Vorstedt through the cargo bay calling the dead by name and dropped a loaded container on him^{b34 b35}. The personal-account half of the post-midpoint approach is closed. Riggs is on the dock, mortally wounded. Rudd appears with a pistol over him and invokes the shield by name: "Diplomatic immunity!"^b36a. From cover, Murtaugh fires a single shot through Rudd's head: "It's just been revoked." Rudd drops^b36b.

The certainty-moment is Murtaugh's bullet. The film has spent two hours building the immunity shield into a procedural wall: Rudd's "you couldn't even give me a parking ticket" at the consular residence^b13, the captain's "we can't touch him, arrest him, prosecute him"^b14, the formal apology pending with the State Department. The mission required voiding the shield from inside, and the post-midpoint approach was Riggs's reframe of the case as a personal account that Murtaugh would endorse. The bullet is the endorsement. Three words name the legal mechanism being voided in real time. Vorstedt's death at b35 closed Riggs's personal half; Rudd's death at b36b closes the institutional half that only Murtaugh could close.

Rudd's "Diplomatic immunity!" at b36a is escalation, not climax — the shield being invoked one last time. The certainty comes when the bullet finds Rudd.

The wind-down differs because

Murtaugh holding Riggs on the dock at b37 — "You're not dead until I tell you" — is closes sub-arc, not test: it pays off the partnership that LW1 built and LW2 stress-tested. The cigarette-pack handoff at b38^b38 is the toilet-bomb callback closing the running gag from b15–b16. Murtaugh's "they been de-kaffirnated" at b39 confirms the antagonists dead in apartheid-pointed jargon, and the partnership is intact joking through the cut to sirens at b40^b40. None of these tests the mission, because the shield voided at b36b.

Why this is a validation climax

The post-midpoint approach is named at b28^b28 — "I'm not a cop tonight. It's personal. I'm not a cop." — and signed onto at b29 when Murtaugh asks "You got a plan?". The falling action builds the asymmetric two-cop phase: the stilt-house extraction with the tow-truck cable, the Alba Varden cargo container, the dock firefight. By the time Rudd levels his pistol the approach is fully formed and Murtaugh has been operating outside his by-the-book role for the entire act. The bullet through Rudd's head confirms an already-built understanding under the maximum-pressure cliché — the wounded protagonist on the ground with the antagonist's gun on him. The sequel-coded redemption holds: not the construction of a new self (LW1's arc), but the closure of the wound LW1 left in place, performed in the only currency the system would accept.