Lethal Weapon Legacy Director's Cut Box Set (1987)

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This is a good set of four very entertaining films and these days can be purchased for less than $40.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Lethal Weapon-Director's Cut (1987)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Main Menu Audio & Animation Listing-Cast & Crew
Rating
Year Of Production	1987
Running Time	112:17
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (59:07)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Richard Donner
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Mel Gibson Danny Glover Gary Busey Darlene Love Traci Wolfe
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Michael Kamen Eric Clapton

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese German Romanian Bulgarian English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes, it's a 1980s film, after all
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, mildly
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The concept of a buddy movie has been with us for a long time, probably since the advent of talkies, and there's certainly quite a number that have fallen by the wayside in the years since they were released. So what, exactly, puts Lethal Weapon ahead of the pack? Well, at the time it paired an ageing family-man cop with a young cop who had nothing to lose, and left the audience wondering who was going to kill them first: the thugs they were investigating or each other. There is also one theory in creative circles that an artist does his best work when he is in complete obscurity, with no audience (or financier) feedback to alter the translation of their creative ideas to whatever medium it is they are working on. Lethal Weapon certainly goes a long way to prove that theory, since few people in Hollywood had any idea who Mel Gibson was, and the total budget was not all that high, so there was a lot less pressure to succeed.

    The film begins with a young prostitute climbing up on the balcony of a hotel and jumping off, falling dozens of stories until she lands on a car, where she is found the next day by the police. This prostitute goes by the name of Amanda Hunsaker (Jackie Swanson), and her father, Michael (Tom Atkins), has been trying to contact a friend in the police force for a while beforehand. This friend in the force just happens to be Detective Sergeant Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), who has just turned fifty and wants to get through the rest of his career as quietly as possible. Given that he has a lovely wife who goes by the name of Trish (Darlene Love) and can't cook worth a damn, not to mention three children including the teenaged Rianne (Traci Wolfe), you can't really blame him. Fate, however, has other ideas when he discovers his new partner is a suicidal ex-Special Forces soldier by the name of Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), although it would be all too easy to mistake him for a "crook", as Carrie Murtaugh (Ebonie Smith) does.

    When they go to investigate Amanda Hunsaker's death, they find another prostitute by the name of Dixie (Lycia Naff), but she isn't much help to them since her house blows up, with her in it, right in front of them. After a chat with Michael Hunsaker, they soon discover that they have stumbled onto an old smuggling ring dating back to the Vietnam war, led by General Peter McAllister (Mitchell Ryan) and a blonde known only as Mister Joshua (Gary Busey). Of course, they would prefer that the secret of their business operations remain under wraps, and proceed to kill everyone who might talk to the police about it, showing up just as Michael is about to spill the beans. When these drug smugglers kidnap Rianne, Roger and Martin make up their own minds to wage war upon them, and I'm sure everyone knows how it turns out since there are three more episodes in this franchise. The question on everyone's lips, of course, is why they would want to buy yet another version of this action classic, with this being the second DVD-Video of the film.

    The first answer, and the ever so slightly less important one in my view, is the presence of seven more minutes, not accounting for the PAL speedup of this disc, of footage that was originally left on the cutting room floor in order to tighten the pace. Anyone who has seen the snippets of this footage that are included as extras on the Lethal Weapon 4 disc will agree that they add something to the film, and it is about time this more complete version of the film was available. If you are into having more footage or a more complete narrative, then this is the best version available at the moment, and it will probably remain that way for some time to come. Those who would prefer a better-looking picture will also be happy with the difference in technical terms between the two discs, as I am about to explain.

Video

    The second reason why this disc is definitely the preferred version of Lethal Weapon can be described in two words: RSDL formatting.

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, a slight opening of the mattes from the intended 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. Right off the bat, the transfer is much sharper than the original theatrical cut that was released onto the Australian DVD-Video market sometime last year, with the average bitrate hovering above seven megabits per second rather than a measly three or four. The shadow detail is slightly improved by the looser compression, although it is still only average compared to more recent vintage films. There is no low-level noise.

    The colours of this transfer reflect the film, in that they are muted and drab, lending the appropriate atmosphere to the proceedings in exactly the same way that the latter two sequels don't. There were no problems with bleeding, misregistration, or composite artefacts.

    MPEG artefacts were not a problem for this transfer, which is the most clean and natural-looking transfer of Lethal Weapon to date in this regard. The nasty MPEG artefact that was found during Mel Gibson's post-dinner conversation with Danny Glover at approximately 53:18, when the extra footage in this cut is accounted for, was nowhere to be seen. There were a few moderate instances of aliasing scattered through the picture, as well as a dozen minor ones that were mostly confined to car chrome and other metallic objects. The only instance I found very seriously objectionable was at 69:53, when Tom Atkins goes to the window and the top of the horizontal frames shimmer quite noticeably. Aside from this, there were no seriously distracting examples of film-to-video artefacts in this transfer. Film artefacts were found with moderate frequency, but their severity was more than acceptable given the age of the film.

    There are English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles presented on this disc, and they are roughly ninety percent accurate to the spoken dialogue. An Italian for the Hearing Impaired option is also available, and although I wasn't specifically able to test its faithfulness to the dialogue, I was assured that apart from the usual amount that is lost in the translation from English to Italian, these subtitles are perfectly serviceable.

    This disc uses the RSDL format, and a great many of the improvements in the transfer quality can be associated with this fact. The layer change takes place during Chapter 20, just after Danny Glover yells "get out of here". The pause at 59:07 is only given away by the interruption to the sound of a motor driving the targets at the shooting range into place.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are a total of three soundtracks available on this disc, all of them encoded in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a bitrate of 384 kilobits per second. The first and default soundtrack is the original English dialogue, with dubs in French and Italian also present. I listened primarily to the English dialogue, and compared a few scenes in Italian for the benefit of a friend.

    The dialogue in the English soundtrack is clear and easy to understand at almost all times, with one or two words occasionally being muttered a little too quietly, but this is easy to accept. The Italian soundtrack sounds a little louder than the English soundtrack, with the dialogue being noticeably higher in the mix. There were no subjectively discernable problems with audio sync at any time.

    The music in this film is credited to Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen, and it is a very appropriate effort, given the partly comedic theme of the film. The more downbeat and minor themes have a hint of irony in them, and the overall result is a score that is very keyed into, and supportive of, the film. I found that this music was nothing special overall, but others have told me it is masterful stuff, so you may well find it more enveloping than I did.

    The surround channels receive a moderate workout from this film, with music, gunshots, passing cars, and a helicopter getting most of the surround channel use. There was one instance where the music at 11:04 found its way into the surround channels, and created a nicely enveloping field that drew me into the film. The use of the surround channels for gunshots at 17:52 seemed a little unnatural, however, with the entire effect seeming to come from the rears, an effect that just didn't quite jibe with the visuals.  The best use of the sound field came when a car explodes at 99:00, with all five main speakers and the subwoofer erupting into life.

    Speaking of the subwoofer, it was used throughout the film to support gunshots, explosions, bodies landing on cars, and a host of other bass-heavy effects that added a nice floor to the film. Although it wasn't used as heavily as one might expect, it did support the action faithfully without calling any specific attention to itself.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Notes explaining why the restored footage has been put back in place would have been nice, but instead all we get is the same extras as were present on the original release.

Menu

    The menu features an excellently-looped piece of video from the film with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. Navigating this menu is a breeze.

Cast & Crew Listing

    A listing of the principal cast and principal crew. This hardly even counts as an extra in my view.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• DTS Soundtrack

    Let's be a little more objective here and think carefully about how much benefit a DTS soundtrack would really be. Widescreen Review have stated that the only advantage of the DTS soundtrack on the Region 1 disc is more definition in the bass channel, with no real gains in the fidelity or activeness of the surrounds. If you really need to have a DTS soundtrack, then Region 1 is the way to go, but don't expect it to be that much of an improvement. Given that Region 1's picture also suffers from what Widescreen Review describe as minor pixelization, I'm inclined to go for the local disc, if only by a small margin.

    Lethal Weapon is yet another great film that has been diminished by a greedy production company dipping back into the well a few too many times. Here, the chemistry between the leads is perfect, while the villains are some of the best that have been captured on celluloid in the past thirty years.

    The video transfer is very good. This is the version of the disc that Warner Home Entertainment should have released in the first place.

    The audio transfer is excellent, although it is not quite perfect.

    The extras are as close to non-existent as makes no odds.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Lethal Weapon 2-Director's Cut (1989)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Main Menu Audio & Animation Listing-Cast & Crew Featurette-Stunts And Action
Rating
Year Of Production	1989
Running Time	113:10
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (54:44)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Richard Donner
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Mel Gibson Danny Glover Joe Pesci Joss Ackland Derrick O'Connor Patsy Kensit
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Michael Kamen Eric Clapton David Sanborn

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese German Romanian Bulgarian English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes, but Martin is trying to quit. Honest.
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, want to guess which company made Martin's jacket?
		Action In or After Credits	No

    When a film succeeds well beyond expectations and its own budget as Lethal Weapon did, it stands to reason that the film company will want to indulge in a few sequels, just as Warner Brothers have also done with the Mad Max franchise. Lethal Weapon 2 is the first and most successful attempt to return to the well, as well as the only sequel in the series that really stands up to repeat viewings. Of course, with financial limitations removed to a great extent, the writers and director obviously felt that they had to have more of everything: more gunshots, more explosions, more deaths (and more inventive ones at that), and more sex. The only problem with this approach is that they also felt that they had to have more unnecessary comedy, when it was the gritty realism of the original that made it such a big hit.

    The story picks up a couple of years after the events in the original Lethal Weapon, with Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) speeding after a group of drug smugglers in a station wagon. The drug bust escalates a long way from what Roger had originally estimated, with a two-way chase ensuing before a helicopter emerges in the middle of a city block to pick up two of the perps. When the other suspect manages to crash into what looks like a small restaurant, Martin and Roger think they've managed to let him get away until they hear a clunking noise in the boot. When they open it, however, what they find is a massive fortune in South African Krugerrands, so much so that the man who lost them, Hans (Mark Rolston) is shot dead. The leaders of this rather nasty mob, Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O'Connor), decide that warning the police off would be the best way to go. To this end, the latter invades Roger's home, tapes both him and Trish (Darlene Love) up, then threaten them in the same sort of way that one can only credit to psychopaths or cowards.

    Thinking that the dynamic duo could use a break, Captain Ed Murphy (Steve Kahan) puts them on the case of Leo Getz (Joe Pesci), figuring that they can protect this man until the Feds take over. After one of the South African thugs attempts to assassinate all three of them, however, they soon find that the drug dealers they were chasing in the opening sequence and the people Leo is scheduled to testify against are the same people. When they raid the house, however, they are also dismayed to find that these smugglers just happen to be South African diplomats, and that they cannot be prosecuted under international laws. Essentially, they are resurrecting the triangle trade, with drugs being exchanged for dollars, which are in turn exchanged for Krugerrands. Of course, in the meantime we are given an update in the progress of the lives of Rianne (Traci Wolfe), Nick (Damon Hines), and Carrie Murtaugh (Ebonie Smith), with the first seeming to have recovered well from her experiences in the previous episode. Since there are another two sequels in the franchise, you know full well that the destructive duo are going to kill all the bad guys and destroy their property. The fun, as they say, is in watching them do it.

    Of the three sequels, this is definitely the best, with our heroes in fine form and the real main nemesis of the show being quite a formidable opponent with a bit of personality. The only weak point I can think of in this film compared to its predecessor is that the good guys just don't seem to develop as well this time around, but this is a minor complaint considering that this is an action film we're talking about.

Video

    Readers will recall that when I took a look at the first release of this disc, which was actually the first out of the series to be released on our beloved format, I found the transfer to be quite mediocre overall. This new Director's Cut is an improvement in most areas, but there is still quite a serious problem with film-to-video artefacts.

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. The benefit of this widescreen transfer is immediately obvious to the eye during shots such as at 16:46, which is the sort of 2.35:1 shot that Sergio Leone would be proud of.

    The sharpness of this transfer is excellent, such that one could be forgiven for thinking the film was shot twelve months ago, rather than twelve years ago. There is little point in mentioning specific examples, as the entire feature is improved by the extra layer. The shadow detail is also much improved compared to the original release, with the aforementioned shot having much more detail to add to its compositional beauty. There is no low-level noise.

    The colours of Lethal Weapon 2 are slightly brighter than is the case with its predecessor, with richer tones and brighter lighting giving the film a nice and easy look during the more light-hearted sequences. The ugly, dark look that presented itself through almost all of Lethal Weapon reasserts itself during the last quarter of the film, and the transfer captures this without missing a beat. There are no instances of colour bleeding or composite artefacts.

    MPEG artefacts are not an issue in this transfer. Film-to-video artefacts, however, are found in abundance during this transfer, so much so that it makes up for the lack of such artefacts in Lethal Weapon. The worst offender in this regard was the headquarters of the South African smugglers, with the windows exhibiting a rather distracting moiré pattern, at 36:48, for example. Car grilles were also another major offender, with scarcely a shot with this item in it going by without showing a lot of distracting shimmer. This was extremely disappointing, given how much smoother and cleaner the picture would have looked without this artefact to screw things up. Film artefacts were found in acceptable amounts, usually consisting of small black and white nicks on the picture.

    The English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles are much the same as they were on the original Lethal Weapon, being about ninety percent faithful to the actual dialogue.

    This disc makes use of the RSDL format, with the layer change taking place during Chapter 21 at 54:44. This is just after the message on the toilet paper is rolled up, and although it is noticeable, it is probably one of the least disruptive places where it could have been placed.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Accompanying a disappointing video transfer is an audio transfer that I would not mind showing off to friends.

    There are three soundtracks on this disc, all of them encoded in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a bitrate of 384 kilobits per second. The first, and default, soundtrack is the original English dialogue, with dubs in French and Italian being presented for good measure. I listened to the English dialogue and parts of the Italian dub. I found that the difference in fidelity between these two soundtracks is very minimal, the Italian voices having slightly more prominence in the soundtrack.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand most of the time. A couple of words, such as "on foot" at 3:56 were hard to make out, but these words were a bit of a problem in every other format I've listened to the film with, so that's no problem. Aside from that, even the phoney South African accents were quite easy to understand, and there were no discernable problems with audio sync, at least not subjectively.

    The score music in this film is credited to Eric Clapton, Michael Kamen, and David Sanborn. I am not sure why an extra person was added, as the score in this film sounds almost identical to the previous episode. Still, it is very appropriate to the action on the screen, and one can't ask for any more than that. The more sombre moments of the film are still the best ones in terms of musical support, naturally.

    The surround channels are used very aggressively to support the car chases and other such instances of directional sound effects, and it appears that in this case, Warner Home Entertainment have gone right back to the source materials and given the soundtrack a good remix. Split surround effects, usually in the left channel, can be heard at 3:09 and at 36:09, with additional split surround effects coming from both channels all the way through the tow truck chase sequence. There are too many examples of excellent surround usage to name them all here, but suffice it to say that this is where the biggest improvement over the disc containing the theatrical cut of the film can be found.

    The subwoofer was also aggressively utilised to support the action sequences, falling off slightly during the quieter moments when the story is advanced. This is to be expected somewhat with a film of this vintage, however, and is only mildly problematic. When the subwoofer was used, at times such as the toilet explosion at 60:38, the usage was worked seamlessly into the quieter moments around it, making this usage quite inconspicuous in spite of its sudden nature. In a nutshell, this is how a remixed soundtrack for a film that predates Dolby Digital should sound.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu features some well-themed animation and a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. It is 16x9 Enhanced and easy to navigate.

Cast & Crew Listing

    Well, what else can I say? It's not as if this even counts as an extra.

Featurette - Stunts And Action

   This three minute and forty-four second featurette is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 with Dolby Digital 1.0 sound, and is not 16x9 Enhanced. The video quality is very much improved compared to the transfer of this extra that appears on the original single-layered version of Lethal Weapon 2. It is also worth watching to see how the tow truck sequence was accomplished, and how much is missing from it when it is cut to fit a 4:3 display.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• DTS Soundtrack

    Once again, Widescreen Review have described this DTS soundtrack as only being of benefit in the lower registers, with tighter bass definition. If this minor gain is enough to make you want to spend the necessary funds to import the Region 1 disc, then one should also be aware that the Region 1 disc suffers what this same site describes as minor pixelization. The only compelling difference I can think of that would justify importing the Region 1 disc would be less aliasing, and anyone who can confirm of deny this is welcome to contact me.

    Lethal Weapon 2 is a great action film, and a worthy successor to the original, even though it does recycle a tad too much from that episode. The extra footage that has been added to this version enriches it a tad, but the real reason to buy this disc is to see the difference in video quality a second layer can make. It's too bad that it didn't make much more of a difference.

    The video transfer could have been very near to reference quality if not for the aliasing.

    The audio transfer is nearly reference quality.

    The extras are very minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Lethal Weapon 3-Director's Cut (1992)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Main Menu Audio & Animation Listing-Cast & Crew
Rating
Year Of Production	1992
Running Time	116:00
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (59:47)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Richard Donner
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Mel Gibson Danny Glover Joe Pesci Rene Russo Stuart Wilson
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Michael Kamen Eric Clapton David Sanborn

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese German Romanian Bulgarian English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes, but Martin is trying to quit
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, mildly
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, a funny joke at the end of the credits

    Lethal Weapon 3 is the least of the Lethal Weapon trilogy (no, episode four doesn't count as far as I am concerned). Part of the blame for this can be placed upon the lack of spontaneity in the humour, but most of it falls fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the head villain. Indeed, some jokers who saw the film early told me that there would have been more suspense in a geriatric version of Riggs and Murtaugh hitting one another over the heads with walking frames. It's not that the script is bad, or that the central premise is lacking anything other than a restraint of director Richard Donner's propensity to beat us over the head with a political message, it's just that the Martin Riggs of the previous two films would have chewed up Jack Travis and spat out the pips.

    The film begins with Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) visiting an office building where one of the workers claims he found a bomb sitting on the back seat of a car. Roger has eight days to go until he retires, and doesn't want anything to do with bombs, but Martin wants to go in and have a look, confident in the presumed knowledge that there's no bomb in the building. Unfortunately, it turns out that Roger was right, and the whole escapade ends with the building exploding, although they do manage to save the little cat they found in there. With a week to go until retirement, Roger and Martin are busted down to lowly patrolmen, and they somehow manage to interrupt an armoured car robbery once they get done terrorising a local pedestrian. This is when Internal Affairs officer Lorna Cole (Rene Russo) enters the picture, and the thief that they managed to capture from the robbery, Billy Phelps (Mark Pellegrino) is shot and killed while waiting in the interrogation room.

    Naturally, the assassin didn't know that there was a camera in the interrogation room, but then again, neither did Captain Ed Murphy (Steve Kahan) or any other policeman bar those connected with Internal Affairs. What the tape from the interrogation room reveals is that Billy was killed by a former Lieutenant who goes by the name of Jack Travis (Stuart Wilson), who, according to Captain Ed, is as tough as they come. I think the poor, overworked Captain must have been hitting the sauce a little too hard at the time, since the fight between Riggs and Travis at the end is a complete mismatch. Anyway, Travis' big scheme revolves around stealing munitions and weaponry from the LAPD's storage unit and selling them back to the thugs on the street before said weapons can be destroyed. One person who winds up buying one of these automatic weapons with armour-piercing bullets is Darryl (Bobby Wynn), who just happens to be one of Nick Murtaugh's friends from high school. I think this shift in focus from Rianne Murtaugh (Traci Wolfe) to Nick Murtaugh (Damon Hines) is one of the film's stronger points, as the first two films really developed Rianne as far as she could go. Nick, on the other hand, is still a very interesting character, and the interactions between Nick and Roger bring back some of the character growth that was missing from Lethal Weapon 2.

    The addition of this many new characters to the Lethal Weapon cast ultimately bogs down the proceedings, especially in light of the fact that Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) is still around, and still very annoying. While Traci Wolfe and Damon Hines barely had two dozen lines between them in the previous episode, one gets the feeling that the former's involvement in the picture could have been cut down to nothing without anything being lost in the narrative. Other characters from the past two episodes are under-utilised, and the gun control message here is painfully lopsided in the use of Darryl and his parents (Sylvia Webb White and Danny 'Big Black' Rey) as mere pawns. Still, if you shut these faults of the film out and just concentrate on enjoying the action, then this film might just squeak by. With the extra footage that has been restored, including a piece of footage with Sam in it at 63:55, this is the best possible cut of the film one can really ask for.

Video

    Lethal Weapon 3 has a slightly better transfer than the previous episode, but it isn't quite as good as the original episode. If you have an eighty centimeter or larger display that isn't capable of accepting a progressive signal, then you might find this transfer to be on the slightly objectionable side. Like Lethal Weapon 2, it's a constant trade-off: at what point does a lack of sharpness in the image become more objectionable than the shimmering?

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and it is 16x9 Enhanced.

    The transfer is very sharp, and it is the best transfer of a Lethal Weapon disc in this regard. Unfortunately, this is also where a lot of the problems with aliasing come from, but I find this preferable to the hazy, blurred transfers that the middle two episodes in the franchise originally suffered. The shadow detail is also quite an improvement compared to the original DVD that was released early on, with more discernable details in wide shots to make them seem that little bit more sumptuous. There is no low-level noise in the picture.

    The colours in this movie vary somewhat, with the action scenes having that dark, muted style of the original Lethal Weapon, while other moments that could have done with the sombre arrangements, such as the shooting, have a brighter, warmer arrangement. Regardless of how suitable these arrangements are for the scenes, the transfer captures them all without a hiccup.

    MPEG artefacts were not a problem in this transfer at all, with an average bitrate of seven and a half per second, as opposed to the original single-layer disc's three or four, keeping the MPEG nasties at bay. Film-to-video artefacts are the only disappointing aspect of this transfer, with anything that can show aliasing, power cables being the best example, showing it in copious amounts. The worst example, at least in my view, comes at 47:39, in a window within the Murtaugh family home just after the shooting. The aliasing was more tolerable than in Lethal Weapon 2, although the frequency is at a similar level. Film artefacts were minimal at the worst of times, with just a few minor black marks making their way into the picture from time to time.

    The English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles on this disc are only about seventy percent accurate to the dialogue, with the all-important structure that makes the more subtle jokes funny being almost entirely lost. For example, at 7:19, "Right, oops" becomes "Right, whoops", and this is the least annoying example in the introduction.

    This disc is RSDL formatted, and once again, the difference this makes to the picture quality is phenomenal. The layer change takes place nearly a minute into Chapter 16 at 59:47. This is just after Mel Gibson taps a few random keys on Rene Russo's keyboard, and it is somewhat noticeable. It would have been a little better at the beginning of the Chapter, but probably just as noticeable, anyway.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Even if the video transfer isn't what I would use to demonstrate my system to family or friends, the audio transfer is.

    We have a choice of three soundtracks, all of them in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a bitrate of 384 kilobits per second. The first, and default, soundtrack is the original English dialogue, with dubs in French and Italian rounding out the list. I listened primarily to the English dialogue, and listened to a couple of passages in Italian for curiosity's sake.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand at almost all times, with maybe a couple of words being mumbled in such a way that makes understanding them a tad more difficult. I found little to complain about in this soundtrack, however, so I'm not going to take off points for just a couple of mumbled words. There were no discernable problems with audio sync.

    The music in this film is the work of Eric Clapton, Michael Kamen, and David Sanborn. It is fundamentally identical to the score music of the previous two episodes, although it still matches and enhances the on-screen action very well. Some contemporary numbers make an appearance, but these are forgettable to the point that even fans of the artists responsible will have trouble remembering them.

    The surround channels are aggressively utilised to support the action sequences and the music, creating a nice, immersive sound field that immerses the viewer in the action. It is not quite as immersive as the action sequences in the previous two episodes, but the sound field is a little more consistent here. When the bomb goes off at 6:06, both the surrounds and the subwoofer burst into life to give it the sort of oomph that the VHS format cannot.

    The subwoofer was aggressively utilised to support the music, cars, and action sequences, with the shoot-out sequence at 87:19 and the moment where the two armoured cars crash together at 10:47 being given a powerful floor that adds to the aggression of the soundtrack without making itself conspicuous. It was very well integrated into the overall sound field.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    Another well-themed, animated menu with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound and 16x9 Enhancement.

Cast & Crew Listing

    It's not even a cursory filmography, or even an extra in my view.

    Again, the Region 4 version of the disc misses out on a DTS soundtrack. Again, reliable sources describe the gain in fidelity as being minimal with some minor pixelization being introduced in the video transfer, so unless you are a fanatic about DTS, the superlative transfer of Region 4's disc makes it the version of choice.

    Mel Gibson and Danny Glover give it their best, but an overcrowded cast and a weak villain makes Lethal Weapon 3 hard to recommend to anyone but completists. While episode three is by no means the weakest of the Lethal Weapon series, episode four has such a weak script that, in spite of an excellent villain, it is often not counted as part of the canon at all. Still, if the idea of Mel Gibson eating dog biscuits and comparing battle scars with Rene Russo is enough to satisfy your requirements for an evening's viewing, then Lethal Weapon 3 is worth checking out, especially given the difference that the three extra minutes of footage makes.

    The video transfer is excellent, although some noticeable aliasing artefacts deny it reference status.

    The audio transfer is a reference example of how to remix a (nearly) decade-old film.

    The extras are virtually non-existent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	Theatrical Trailer-4 Featurette-Pure Lethal Interviews-Cast & Crew Unseen Footage-Lethal Weapon 1-3 Outtakes-Lethal Weapon 1-3 Biographies-Cast & Crew Featurette-B-Roll Footage
Rating
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	122:12 (Case: 127)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Sided	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Richard Donner
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Mel Gibson Danny Glover Joe Pesci Rene Russo Chris Rock Jet Li
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$29.95	Music	Michael Kamen Eric Clapton

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Dutch Arabic Italian Portuguese Spanish English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, just a tiny bit
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, during credits

    The film starts with Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) responding to an emergency in which some armoured lunatic is using an assault rifle and a flame-thrower to terrorize a sector of the inner city. Their merits as combat veterans rotating back into a life as policemen that made Lethal Weapon so interesting are gone, and the attempts at humour have reached a level that makes me very sick. Leo Getz (Joe Pesci) returns with his usual interjections of okays, but now the script adds another word to his vocabulary in the shape of "whatever". I presume this challenge was offered to Pesci when he got sick of the threats to have his tongue surgically excised for tormenting action fans with his constant okaying. Roger's daughter Rianne (Traci Wolfe) is carrying the baby of one young detective named Lee Butters (Chris Rock), and is married to him somehow without Roger knowing about it. Incidentally, Lorna Cole (Rene Russo), the character that somehow managed to save the previous sequel from the depths of sheer boredom, is reduced to a prop by this plot. She is listed in the fourth position in the credits, but she only seems to get about fifty minutes of screen time. What happened to the fierce detective who could take on five thugs at once with just her bare hands? Screenwriter Channing Gibson (no relation) should have been shot for penning this effort.

    Even if you only have a very mild interest in the Lethal Weapon series (as I do), I am sure you will join me in a wild chorus of agonizing disappointment with this instalment. The usual banter between the action scenes which made the other three films so much more enjoyable has been reduced to an annoyance in this episode because of the fact that Joe Pesci and Chris Rock are actually allowed to speak to one another. At least Joe Pesci has demonstrated that he has an ability to act, but this character will go down in memory as one of the most irritating in the history of cinema. We are even treated to material of such a low grade that it could honestly be construed as homophobic (the interaction between Murtaugh and Butters) and racist (Riggs' use of Murtaugh as a decoy in the opening sequence). Okay, so you have to be a little creative to see those parts of the script in that way, but the point is that the series has gone from a believable story involving the day-to-day antics of an emotionally ill character portrayed in a compelling way to one that will offend some sensitive minds. The only believable line spoken during this film is one by a Chinese triad member by the name of Wah Sing Ku (Jet Li) about the way in which Riggs behaves during his visit to a Chinese restaurant: "in Hong Kong, you'd be dead". By this time, this film is certainly dead to me in terms of story development. All the restored violence in the world (the theatrical release was only rated M) cannot save a film with a poor plot.

Video

    The transfer is presented in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1, complete with 16x9 Enhancement. The transfer is generally very sharp, with plenty of detail on offer throughout most of the film, although backgrounds had a tendency to become soft and ill-defined during slower sequences. Shadow detail is also very good, with plenty of subtle detail on offer in all dimly-lit sections of the film, which is especially important given that the film's climax takes place in a barely-lit factory during the middle of the night. Low-level noise is not a real problem in this transfer, and neither is film grain.

    The colour saturation is not-so-slightly problematic in this transfer, especially during the first fifteen minutes of the film. Lethal Weapon 4 is by far the most heavily saturated episode in the series, making it somewhat at odds with the grimy, seedy look that was used during the other three episodes to set the proper atmosphere. During the opening sequence, the colours are oversaturated to the point of bleeding and becoming quite unpleasant to look at. This settled down for the rest of the film, but it still remains problematic and unsettling throughout, partly because it simply looks so far away from what one should expect from the series.

    MPEG artefacts are not a serious problem in this feature, which is surprising when you consider how demanding both the pace and settings of this film are. It is a wonder that there didn't seem to be any motion compensation artefacts during the fight sequences. Film-to-video artefacts were the biggest problem in this transfer, with many occurrences from all of the usual culprits, ranging from minor to somewhat distracting. Film artefacts were almost non-existent, as one would reasonably expect from a film of this recent vintage. There was one momentary series of vertical lines through the picture at 23:49 that may or may not be an MPEG artefact, but I am erring on the side of caution and labelling them as either film artefacts or marks that were somehow left on the picture during the telecine process. They are extremely distracting and the worst artefact of the transfer, and I am sure that Columbia Tristar would reject a pressing of one of their films that contained something which looks this bad.

    This disc is a flipper, with most of the extras on side B. Please don't bother to write me about how this technically doesn't make it a flipper because the end result is still the same - the disc is easy prey for the oil that secretes from your fingertips and palms, especially when someone not quite as careful as you or I gets their hands on it. While the formatting is not disruptive to the film, RSDL formatting would have been preferable since this would allow the film itself significantly more space to breathe.

Audio

    There are three soundtracks on this DVD, all of which are encoded in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a bitrate of 384 kilobits per second: the original English dialogue, with dubs in French and Italian. I listened to the default English soundtrack, and sampled a couple of passages in the Italian dub for a laugh.

    The dialogue was clear and easy to understand once the problematic first fifteen minutes of the film were out of the way. During those fifteen minutes when the video transfer was also quite a problem, the dialogue was muffled and unclear, as well as drowned out by ambient sound effects. This is rather annoying and tends to leave the average viewer in a perpetual state of wonder as to what was being said during this crucial time in the film, in spite of the fact that the quality of the dialogue is not much to write home about. The level of the dialogue improved after the first fifteen minutes, but it is a real pity that the same cannot be said for the quality of the dialogue, especially given that Chris Rock is introduced into the film after this point. There were no subjective problems with audio sync during the English dialogue, but the small handful of lines that are rendered in Chinese made me wonder if they were dubbed.

    The score music in this film is credited to Michael Kamen, Eric Clapton, and David Sanborn. Just as most of the magic from the other three films seems to be missing from the plot, it also seems to be missing from this score music. Repetition does not work, and this score music proves it, as there don't seem to be any distinct themes used here that made me sit up and notice their unique beauty. Indeed, for all I know to the contrary, all of the musical cues in this soundtrack could have simply been lifted from the previous episodes and simply served up again. Even a couple of scenes in the film seem to share the same musical cue, which is a very bad sign in my terms.

    The surround channels were very aggressively used to support the plethora of gunshot and explosion sounds, as well as the frequent musical cues and ambient effects. Although the surround channel usage is not that greatly improved compared to the remix of the original, the fidelity in the surround effects is greater simply because there was more of it to begin with. There are none of those instances in which the sound field collapses into mono or stereo, although there are times when the surround effects become quiet enough to miss. It is a terrible shame about the problems with the first fifteen minutes of the film, because this soundtrack is otherwise very highly enveloping and immersive. The subwoofer is very well-integrated into the overall soundtrack, putting a superb bottom end on the action, all without calling any specific attention to itself.

Menu

Cast & Crew Biographies

Featurette - Pure Lethal (30:36)

Featurette - Cut/Extended Scenes: Lethal Weapon 1, 2, and 3 (8:51, 4:14, and 3:44 respectively)

Cast & Crew Interviews

Featurette - B-Roll Footage (10:17)

Theatrical Trailers - Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2, Lethal Weapon 3, and Lethal Weapon 4

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• Director's commentary

    Aside from some problems early on in the film, the video quality is very good.

    Aside from some problems early on in the film, the audio quality is also very good.

    The extras are comprehensive, lacking only a commentary track that makes it clear what a rush-job the script actually was, which was included on the Region 1 release.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall