An Action-Packed Christmas

For FUSION, the publication of my friends at AIER, I wrote about the generation of Christmas action movies written & sometimes directed by Shane Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon. It’s also a story of the downfall of the leading men—from Mel Gibson & Bruce Willis to Val Kilmer & Robert Downey, Jr. to Russell Crowe & Ryan Gosling. There should be another couple for the 2020s, but I don’t know what might be. There are no more heroes!

So I wrote about these problems, saving Christmas & looking for redemption. I’ll lead you off:

Back in 1987, Shane Black became a Hollywood celebrity after writing Lethal Weapon. The film was a hit even before it started a major franchise & quickly found its place among the variations on the major theme of ‘80s Hollywood, friendship between men, camaraderie in a world that might be falling apart or might just be changing into something difficult to recognize for the kind of men formed by industrial work & world wars.

Mel Gibson starred as Riggs, an erratic, suicidal policeman & former Green Beret, who, instead of going through the “five stages of grief,” pulls off a heroic stunt in L.A. Whereas the police psychologist thinks him psychopathic, he might just need someone to blame for his unhappiness—at the end of the movie, having defeated the villain in a MMA fight, he can grieve for his dead wife & go to a Christmas dinner at his partner Murtaugh’s house (Danny Glover), & be reintegrated into suburban middle class life.

Most of Black’s style is already visible in Lethal Weapon. The saying, almost a tagline, “there are no more heroes.” The Christmas setting. The male friendship & the courting of deadly danger. The dark side of American life, where freedom turns into some terrible crime, as the deluded become prey to clever, ruthless people somehow connected to powerful institutions. Black’s left-wing criticism of American power is Oliver Stone-lite, but it spoke to the working-class ethos of the action movie.

Happy Christmas!

Lethal Weapon has a famous action scene set among the Christmas trees of Los Angeles.

But almost a decade earlier, Spielberg did it, too, in an even more comical mood, in his most underrated comedy, 1941 (1979).