Lethal Weapon 5: We’re Getting Too Old For This SH!T

Nearly three decades after Riggs and Murtaugh last shared the screen, Mel Gibson still hasn’t given up on making Lethal Weapon 5. The long-discussed sequel has spent years trapped in development, but Gibson has now revealed considerably more about what the movie would actually look like—and why he believes it could be the strongest installment of the entire franchise. 

But the question begs to be asked… Are we getting too old for this Sh!t? Mel Gibson is 70 and Danny Glover is 80 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Joe Pesci is 83, Renee Russo is 72 and aren’t cops usually retired by now? Glover was 40 years old when he first uttered the famous movie line about him getting too old for his line of work. What does that look like 4 decades later?

In a chat with Collider’s Steven Weintraub at Fan Expo Boston, Gibson shared that he and screenwriter Richard Wenk finished the script after legendary director Richard Donner passed away, and the actor-filmmaker is still determined to direct the project himself if it can ever break free from development hell.

Gibson first reflected on why the original Lethal Weapon worked, crediting Donner and writer Shane Black with making Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh more emotionally vulnerable than the action heroes audiences were accustomed to seeing during the 1980s. He then dropped a much bigger update: Donner had already been developing a fifth movie before his death, and Gibson believes the completed screenplay tops everything that came before it.

“Donner realized it,” said Gibson. “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. 

“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.” 

Gibson also shared uncommon insights into where Riggs and Murtaugh would find themselves decades after Lethal Weapon 4. Instead of chasing the scale of today’s blockbusters with massive visual-effects spectacles, the sequel would intentionally scale back to a tighter, character-driven approach.

“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, Apocolypto. 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,” explained Gibson.  

Gibson also plans to direct the film himself because Donner asked him to take over the franchise if he was unable to finish the movie himself.

"Donner, God rest his soul, he said to me in this deep voice, he said, ‘Hey kid, if I drop off the perch, you’ll take this over, won’t you?’ I said, ‘Shut up! You’re not going anywhere.’ And of course he did. And, you know, when he passed away, I didn’t say anything. But apparently he had told other people that too, so they all came to me and said, ‘You direct it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay.’” 

Gibson then noted that studio politics had helped keep the script from ever reaching production, yet he voiced hope that with Warner Bros., Paramount, and the other players currently reshaping Hollywood’s landscape, the film might finally see the light of day.

“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,” Gibson explained. “And maybe, maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”

There is still no guarantee Lethal Weapon 5 will escape development hell, but Gibson clearly hasn’t abandoned it. Until then, all four Lethal Weapon movies are currently available to stream on Tubi.