MOVIE REVIEW : A Carnival of Carnage

You can endure the sky-high infernos and ear-splitting explosions and high-speed shootouts in “Lethal Weapon 3” (citywide) as long as you keep repeating to yourself, “It’s only a movie.” Actually, the more appropriate mantra should be, “It’s only a cartoon.”

But why put yourself through this endurance test?

The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. In the very first scene, Riggs, the brash one of the duo, drags his partner into a towering, evacuated office building with a ticking bomb and fiddles with the detonator. The explosion is a beauty: The entire seven-story structure collapses in on itself like some great destroyed behemoth. It’s only when these same gargantuan hyper-destructions carry over to the human level that you begin to wonder if this movie, which was ostensibly directed by Richard Donner and scripted by Jeffrey Boam and Robert Mark Kamen, was, in fact, made by androids.

This time around, Murtaugh is seven days away from retirement when he and his partner are ensnared in a case involving a cache of illegal firearms stolen from a police warehouse and intended for destruction. Murtaugh’s family life is as sitcom perfect as ever but Riggs needs a love interest. Enter Lorna Cole (Rene Russo), an Internal Affairs investigator also assigned to the case. Riggs and Lorna take an instant dislike to each other, which means it won’t be long before they’re participants in one of those “lyrical” love interludes that traditionally help break up the mayhem in this genre.

For foreplay, however, they compare each other’s battle scars--a funny premise, even if the idea is partially lifted from a shipboard scene in “Jaws.”

Overkill has become standard in the modern cop action-thriller. Partly this is a response to television; since, on a dramatic level, TV cop fare and movie cop fare are essentially interchangeable, moviemakers have opted to up the body count and decibel level in an attempt to lure audiences out of their homes and into the multiplexes. (This ploy may not have much local appeal right now.) But, with the success of the “Terminator” and “RoboCop” films, the cop thrillers employing the non-Robos are at a disadvantage. The solution thus far, as demonstrated in the “Lethal Weapon” series, has been to cartoonize the carnage and emphasize the buddy-buddy-ism.

It’s a mixed-bag solution. You can’t really suspend disbelief with these shoot-’em-ups the way you can with cartoons. The urban violence and gang melees have too many realistic connotations to be the kind of turn-on that was intended. Even though “Lethal Weapon 3,” (rated R for language and violence) like its predecessors, throws in a few “socially conscious” moments, like the funeral of a gang kid, they feel like sops to the audience (or, more likely, to the watchdogs who might accuse this film of being irresponsible.)

The buddy-buddy stuff is on automatic pilot. Glover and Gibson have turned their duet into a soft-shoe routine with firepower. There’s also a third buddy: Joe Pesci reprises his role as Leo Getz from the last film. Leo is a Beverly Hills real-estate agent with bleached-blond hair this time out. Following up on his henna-rinsed toupee in “JFK,” Pesci seems to be trying out all the primary hair colors.

Pesci was the best thing in “2,” perhaps because he realized that, in a cartoon movie, it’s wise to turn yourself into a cartoon. He sounded like an amalgam of Mel Blanc’s Greatest Voices and his waddling walk had a Looney Tunes pugnacity. He’s doing much the same thing here, but he’s only in the movie in brief, knockabout spurts. He’s actually more prominent in the print ads for the film, where he’s given almost equal prominence with the co-stars. The studio must be trying for a “Three Stooges” effect.

In “Lethal Weapon” we were introduced to Riggs as a suicidal Vietnam War vet whose near-craziness was supposedly inspired by the car-accident death of his wife. There was a good dramatic idea buried in the notion of a cop who craved death so much that he took the kinds of spectacular chances that made him a hero. But the character’s compulsions shifted from scene to scene, and by the second installment, Riggs was just a loopy cut-up.

That’s what he is in “Lethal Weapon 3” too. Riggs keeps pushing things higher and higher in order, apparently, to make a killing and keep from getting bored. He has a lot in common with his creators.

‘Lethal Weapon 3’

Mel Gibson: Martin Riggs

Danny Glover; Roger Murtaugh

Joe Pesci; Leo Getz

Rene Russo; Lorna Cole

A Warner Bros. presentation of a Silver Pictures production. Director Richard Donner. Producers Richard Donner and Joel Silver. Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam & Robert Mark Kamen. Cinematographer Jan De Russo. Editors Robert Brown and Battle Davis. Costumes Nick Scarano. Music Michael Kamen, Eric Clapton and David Sanborn. Production design James Spencer. Art director Greg Papalia. Set decorator Richard Goddard. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (violence and language).