‘Chronicle’ Writer Has Lethal Weapon 5 Idea

It’s been a while since we’ve heard Lethal Weapon 5 talk, I believe the last word, years ago, was when Richard Donner remarked that a fifth movie was supposed to involve Riggs and Murtaugh in a movie where they destroy half a town in an RV, or something.

The writer of Chronicle (and currently promoting American Ultra), Max Landis, has a new idea for a fifth movie though.  In a recent interview with Grantland, while discussing that new film American Ultra, the conversation with Landis and director Nima Nourizadeh quickly turned towards how to go about a new adventure between Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover). To which Landis quickly gave his pitch:

The final Lethal Weapon, if I have to pocket-pitch it right now, is Murtaugh and Riggs are asked to work with a group of, like, four cops who are younger, who were all involved in an action movie that we didn’t see. You hear the report, and it sounds like a Lethal Weapon movie: ‘They drove a school bus off of an oil rig?’ Then Murtaugh and Riggs are assigned to take them on like an Outward Bound program and try to teach them to be better cops and respect authority. Then it turns out the villain from the action movies that we missed is coming to kill them. Murtaugh and Riggs in the woods for the first time in any of the movies, with four characters we really like, do a slasher movie.

I hate to be a negative ninny here, but isn’t the ‘young blood’ thing something we rightly did not like for The Expendables 3?  I mean I dunno, maybe if they killed the four in question off very quickly.  Has this type of thing ever worked?  Maybe in the first Dirty Harry sequel, when the young guys were vigilantes…