This could have been a lot worse than it was.
If I am being honest, I was thinking that the remake of Lethal Weapon into a television series would be a bad idea. The original four movies with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are well-executed cop flicks for their day, so I dreaded the announcement that Fox was looking to make a reboot with Damon Wayans and… Clayne Crawford? Although I went into this show with low expectations, I will say this:
Lethal Weapon is a pleasant surprise.
Clayne Crawford And Damon Wayans Do A Good Job.
These two are likable enough.
As you might expect, the two leads in this show have enough charisma to carry this buddy cop action comedy through to the end. While the pilot might be a modernized take that echoes the first movie, I’m looking forward to seeing how Murtagh and Riggs develop over the course of several episodes. Hopefully, they’ll keep the rapid fire humor consistently funny, as it is a great way to keep people coming back. However, I wouldn’t want Crawford and Wayans to drop into their best Danny Glover or Mel Gibson impression. They should do their own thing, and I have every confidence that they will.
The supporting cast does a good job as well, but the only ones that left a significant impression were Keesha Sharp as Trish Murtagh and Kevin Rahm as Captain Avery. Their performances were admirable, although I think the writers will need more time to flesh out their characters for this new age. Jordana Brewster is in this show, too. However, she only really had a single scene, so there’s not much to talk about with her.
The Action Works Rather Well.
Goofy, but very fun to watch.
There are a lot of fun action scenes in this show, but the strange thing is that it is scrubbed of most of the grittiness that made the original movies great. For that reason, I feel like the show would have been better off on a network like FX, which would have brought it closer to the spirit of the original stories. That being said, the writers did okay with the restrictions of broadcast television.
I particularly like the opening crime at the bank, which immediately sets up the partnership of Murtagh and Riggs as one of opposites. It was a nice introduction that gave us exactly what we needed to know about their personalities, a little bit of action, and then it ends. It’s nice to see that not a lot of screen time is wasted in the story.
The Case Needed Work.
This and the ending fight were great. The middle was a bit too standard.
The trouble with having a case-of-the-week television show instead of a movie is that the story needs to be interesting to keep viewers coming back. Unfortunately, this is where Lethal Weapon kind of fell flat for me. The case was a typical drug bust mixed with a child abduction. There were no real twists or turns in the story. It just seemed to be a means of setting up the next action sequence for Murtagh and Riggs to get past.
Other than that, there is not much to talk about because the villains are your typical evil-doers. They do their bad thing, they screw up somewhere, and then they get arrested. Maybe they’ll do a recurring criminal storyline in the future, but I’d get used to your usual cop show format for now.
Conclusion.
I’m looking forward to seeing them do their own thing.
Lethal Weapon isn’t bad, but it is sanitized and needs a bit of work in the writing department to be the best it can be. While much of it is carried by the charisma of Damon Wayans and Clayne Crawford, I am confident that the creative team can build the show into something great. My only question is how long it might be before someone gets offended at the rough-and-tumble action in this day and age. It does seem to happen a lot with the mixture of entertainment and Internet fandoms.
Up next, we are going to probably tackle either Notorious or Pitch. I am not looking forward to it.
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