Mel says the script to Lethal Weapon 5 is better than the others
Since the passing of director Richard Donner, there has been talk that Mel Gibson would take over for his late friend to helm another sequel to the Lethal Weapon series. However, in the time since, his co-star in those films, Danny Glover, had revealed the unfortunate news that he had been battling Alzheimer’s Disease for a number of years already. Once this news broke, it would seem like a fifth entry would not be able to work given his condition. As Gibson appeared at Fan Expo Boston, he still believes the film can be made and even has talked up the script.
Gibson told Collider that Donner was already developing the fifth film at the time of his passing, but Gibson would finish the script with Richard Wenk. He explained,
There were good things about each one, but as you say, they tend to get diluted out there a lot. And, you know, Donner, when he was 90 years old, was working on the fifth, and of course he passed away in the middle. So I got together with the writer, and we completed it thinking, ‘What would Donner do?’ That’s what we were thinking in the room, and I think that the fifth script is better than all of the others. But it’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”sponsored content
However, he thinks that once Paramount takes over Warner Bros., it might put the film back on track. He stated, “Richard Wenk and I finished the script, and we were going to go into production, but it just never got the wheels under it. I think Warner’s got into some quicksand at that time… so it got buried somewhere, and now I think this David Ellison guy over at Paramount has absorbed or will absorb Warners, or it looks like he will. And maybe, maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”
What would Lethal Weapon 5 be about?
While the plot for Lethal Weapon 5 still hasn’t officially been revealed, Gibson did reveal quite a bit about the movie and how he will give the film the energy of an action film, but also scale back on the carnage that the sequels had ramped up. He expounded,
It only harks back to the others in the minimal way, but it’s a story all on its own. The characters are quite different. They’re older. One’s retired. The other one’s on a desk job. He’s putting on too much weight, and it’s low-tech. It doesn’t get into the big explosions and all this sort of stuff. But it still has the energy and, I think, drive of a big action film. Like, let’s say for instance, Apocalypto. It’s a foot chase, right? But it’s kind of filmed like a car chase. So it still has all the elements of what was in the other films, but not nearly so complicated. But it deals more about the people in it.”
Gibson reflects on the script of the first film
Shane Black‘s script on the original 1987 action film helped the buddy-cop genre take off after 48 Hrs. essentially pioneered it. It was a hot item that put the screenwriter on the map in a big way. Gibson would reflect on what made the script to the first movie so special. He told the publication,
Donner realized it. I think he did all of those films, and sadly he’s passed away. But he sort of knew what he had, and Shane Black wrote a good script. It was timely, you know. It was ’80s. We were used to these tough guys on film who kind of had it all together, but they were tough and two-dimensional in a lot of ways. So this one was better because the main protagonists in the story both had kind of vulnerabilities, and one was crazy, and the other was scared, and it went a little deeper than the usual action flick.”
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