MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Weapon’ Shoots Up the ‘Lethal’ Genre

“Loaded Weapon I” (citywide), which sends up the “Lethal Weapon” series and many other cop-buddy bangathons, isn’t as funny as most of its targets. A collection of flat gags, spiritless action, cornball satire and overbroad or bored-looking performances, it sometimes resembles the draggle-end of a nightmare “Saturday Night Live” show, where the cast has come to despise their own skits.

In this terminally limp spoof, Emilio Estevez and Samuel Jackson take the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover parts, sometimes playing them like condemned men who can’t find their last meal. And Jon Lovitz is a sort of fast-food Joe Pesci, a pesky blob with blond mane and dull eyes.

The plot tries to be cute and mean, simultaneously. Estevez and Jackson, as detectives Colt and Luger, are after a cocaine gang operating inside the Wilderness Girls Cookie factory, and run by a band of effete maniacs: Tim Curry as the fey assassin Dr. Jigsaw and William Shatner as his fey boss, General Mortars, who eats piranhas.

The jokes pile on like junk mail; you almost have to dig your way out from under them. There’s the Hindi convenience store owners and their interpreters, who get robbed; Dr. Joyce Brothers as a coroner; the potato-head suspect; the Squealers Hotel, with its special discounts for federal witnesses. The movie reminds you of a comic who runs onstage, screams “I got a million of ‘em!” and then proceeds to hit one in 10. Except “Loaded Weapon’s” average is lower.

Co-writer-director Gene Quintano prepared for this fiasco by writing two of the “Police Academy” movies, “3” and “4”: not exactly credits that fill you with confidence in “Weapon’s” satirical potential. And he’s handicapped here. When the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams parodied disaster movies in “Airplane!” and cop shows in “Police Squad,” they were taking on forms that were old-fashioned, loaded with dramatic rhetoric. But the “Lethal Weapon” movies are so rhetorically vacant--mostly blood, glitz and explosions, with about an inch of dialogue and character--that it’s hard to satirize them verbally. Quintano wastes most of his energy sending up that inch.

I can’t think of a real reason to see this movie; if you caught the trailer, you already know most of the major laugh lines. And one good reason to stay away is out of respect for this cast. Estevez plays the sexy, near-crazy Riggs-style detective, as if being over the edge had enervated him, and he were trying to improve his lines by ignoring them. As the family man cop, Jackson, a chameleonic actor who’s been excellent in widely varying parts, especially for Spike Lee, almost vanishes into his suit and tie. Jackson won’t push the gags, which shows good taste, and he barely leaves an impression, except for one instant when he starts making crazy-faces over Allyce Beasley’s shoulder.

Whoopi Goldberg, playing Detective York, is assassinated at the beginning. Since she takes no credit and gets killed early, it means she has the best part in the movie. Lively Kathy Ireland, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, plays heroine Destiny Demeanor as if being without a bikini had discombobulated her. Most of the movie’s cameo guests--F. Murray Abraham as a parody of Hannibal Lechter, “Star Trek’s” James Doohan, “CHiPs’ ” Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox and many others as parodies of themselves--wander into their scenes like party guests looking for the hors d’oeuvres.

There’s probably a strategy behind all these bad, empty performances. Estevez and Jackson are clearly under orders to play their scenes deadpan, “Airplane!”-style, but here, the diffidence has the wrong effect. It deadens the material. After a while, it almost kills your desire to laugh.

When a spoof dies, the first casualties are usually energy and rhythm. At the beginning of this movie, after a convenience store robbery, Estevez pimps Eastwood’s Dirty Harry with the line, “I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire 173 shots, or 174?” Of course, the line would be funnier if he read it like Harry does: “Did he fire 174 shots? Or only 173?” Nitpicking? Actually, that moment is one of the funniest in the film, and it shows what most of “Loaded Weapon I” (MPAA-rated PG-13) is like: only half there. Basically, it’s unloaded.

‘Loaded Weapon I’

Emilio Estevez: Jack Colt

Samuel Jackson: Wes Luger

Tim Curry: Dr. Jigsaw

Kathy Ireland: Destiny Demeanor

A New Line Cinema presentation. Director Gene Quintano. Producers Suzanne Todd, David Willis. Executive producers Michel Roy, Howard Klein, Erwin Stoff. Screenplay by Dom Holley, Quintano. Cinematographer Peter Deming. Editor Christopher Greenbury. Costumes Jacki Arthur. Music Robert Folk. Production design Jaymes Hinkle. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.