Hello, and welcome into The Ringerverse from The Ringer. My name is Mallory Ruben. And I'm Van Lait the Mal, before we get started. Does anyone want to know what The Ringerverse is?
The Ringerverse is one podcast feed with multiple shows and all things superheroes, nerd culture, and fandom entertainment. It's the reactions to the releases. Theory breakdowns, one takes on the latest news, and more. Whether you're a casual fan or an obsessive like us, our shows are worthy of all your fandom needs.
So head to The Ringerverse and follow the show NOW on Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. Let's talk about the ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road. The Volkswagen T1, its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore.
Step inside to find available leather seats and wet accents, the kind of interior that makes even grocery runs feel cinematic. Under the hood, the available 268 turbocharged course power engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined T1, you deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more.
S-C-B-W, German engineered for all. We're also brought to you by TheRinger.com as well as the Ringer Podcast Network, where we just launched a brand new podcast that's called New York, New York, with John New Strimpsky, who is coming from the fan in New York, their biggest sports radio station. He's a huge New York sports fan, huge pop culture guy, loves all the same stuff we love at The Ringer. And I'm really excited to see how this pod goes.
There's eight New York teams. He's going to be diving into the whole New York sports scene. Not much differently than I do on my podcast, just with general sports. But if you love New York sports, you want to find out what's going on with all those different teams.
Check out New York, New York, with John New Strimpsky. Coming up, I'm too old for this shit. Chris Ryan, leave the weapons next. Go on!
Go on! Ryan, into the corner. If these two cops can stand each other. Why keep getting into trouble around you, the band dies, don't stand a chance.
You haven't met anybody, shouldn't you? I haven't killed you yet. Mel Gibson, Danny Glover. We better ready for you.
We have the Lethal Weapon. Lethal Weapon is great. Start Friday, March 6th. Alright, Chris Ryan is here.
This is a one for us. It's really to set up the Lethal Weapon 2 podcast, which I personally think Lethal Weapon 2 is this premiere movie. We want to start there. Yeah, so let's talk about this.
I think when people think of Lethal Weapon, what they really think of is Lethal Weapon 2. They think of diplomatic immunity and all that shit. Like they think of the jokes, they think of Leo gets, they think of the banter. Lethal Weapon 1 is a different animal.
Lethal Weapon 1 is a really dark movie. It could have been even darker if they had made the Shane Black script, but Richard Donner kind of made it a lot more. I don't know if that's softer, but he found more humor in it, and that's where he took the franchise after this. Yeah, Lethal Weapon 2 is WrestleMania 3.
It's the culmination. It's one of the great events of all time. But all-time statement statement there. To run, you needed to walk first, and WrestleMania 1 was the walking to WrestleMania 3.
Lethal Weapon sets up Lethal Weapon 2, which I think is, I don't know, we've litigated this before, one of the four greatest sequels of all time. It's like Godfather 2, Aliens 2. We had one other one in there that we loved. Before Sunset.
That's Terminator 2. Terminator 2. Yeah. It was really hard to make a sequel that actually improves on the original.
Setting up the Lethal Weapon framework though, the Buddy Cop movies, we did 48 hours on this pod a couple of months, a couple of years ago. That was kind of the first modern Buddy Cop movie, but it really didn't take off until Running Scared in 86, stake out on Lethal Weapon in 87, and then it basically became a thing that for the next 35 years was either done, copied, imitated. I remember maybe 10 years ago, Kevin Smith did Cop Out with Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Didn't work, wasn't that good, but it was basically Kevin Smith going, I love Lethal Weapon, I wanted to see if I could make my own version of Lethal Weapon.
What made this movie succeed where so many of these others failed? It's a multi-part answer, but let's start there. Well, I think that there's a distinction I would make between the Buddy Cop movie and the Buddy Cop comedy, and so you have movies like Rush Hour that are actually like Buddy Cop comedies, but this one is really playing on the opposites attract. These guys are, are oil and water, can they stay in a car together, much less solve the case together?
And I think that that's where they get a lot of the energy, but like the very specific and very unlikely pairing of these two actors, which I don't think, if you tried to cast this movie a hundred times in 1986 or whenever they cast it it, I think it would be like one out of a hundred times you pick Mel Gibson and Danny Glover and they wind up being, you can still see it today when they did a video trip between Richard Donner a couple of a while back. Like they still have it, they still have this sort of like one in a hundred chemistry between two performers. Yeah, Donner said that he had a, he said they screen tested them together and this is what Donner said. Took about two hours by the time we were done, I was in seventh heaven.
They found a new windows. They found laughter where I never saw it. They found tears where they didn't exist before. More importantly, they found a relationship on just one reading.
So if you ask me about casting was magical, total dynamite. Glover was in Color Purple before that he bounced around. I don't, I don't feel like he was like legitimately famous. He had like a recognizable face.
I think Color Purple probably jumped him up a level, but he certainly wasn't, this wasn't like getting Sam Jackson in the late nineties or anything like that. He wasn't super famous. Yeah. And then eighties and his script is not written for a black actor necessarily and he's also playing older, which is pretty rare.
I think he was 40 in real life playing a 50 year old. So they had 15 years older than Rihanna 13, 13. Yeah. Yeah.
I have that and there's some complications with that whole pot. We'll talk about it in a second. Gibson. So he does, and we're just going to talk about Gibson, we're not going to get into all the other stuff.
Maybe we'll do and what stage the worst we'll do. Yeah. What's the worst thing I want to talk about there? Gibson, 1981 to 1986 becomes a star and we see this happen sometimes where somebody's a star.
Everyone knows he's a star, but they haven't had the vehicle that has officially cemented their star yet. Russell Crowe was like this in the nineties for a little while there and then Gladiator was like the planning the flag. I'm now an A plus listener, but people had kind of seen it for years. It was almost like in the NBA where it's like, Tre Young, it's going to be somebody do treating him like a star and he hasn't won a playoff game yet.
That'll happen sometimes with these actors. It's not happened to Ryan Reynolds forever and then it finally happened for him. Other times it's people they had anointed and it never happens at all. With Gibson, he did three Mad Max movies, which, you know, I'm a little older than you, but those were like big movies.
They were really important early, especially Road Warrior and Thunderdome, right? Because Mad Max was a little bit more of a cult movie and it was the accessible basically they redid Mad Max's. But then he was in year living dangerously, Mrs. Suffle, the river and the bounty and all these were male Gibson, he's an A plus listener, but none of them really made it and then leave the weapon catches him at the perfect time, which is why this became a franchise.
Yeah. So he brings like a certain intensity to obviously everything he does, but I think that when you look at some of the people that they thought about for Riggs and you think about what the movie would have been like, had Gibson not done it, he brings out the kind of, does this guy actually want to live quality, you know, and when you see him when you're introduced to him in that trailer, he looks like a guy who has course for breakfast, you know what I mean? Like it seems like that's his lived experience and the live wire energy and especially man the eyes, like those big bulging eyes that he has for most of this movie. It's just like you feel like you're really like living on the edge of this guy.
Yeah. And it's I think pretty natural to compare him with Russell Crowe, they're kind of, you know, same, same genre, different generations, but they bring a lot of the same things to the table. I think the main difference between them, Russell Crowe, there was a calmness with him. Like he surveyed the scene.
He had a way about him where he was always calculating how do I win this? How do I take advantage of this? How do I survive this? And those were when he's at his best in our favorite movie proof of life, gladiator, beautiful mind, wherever it's like really confidential, sure him surveying things, him kind of soaking stuff in and making decisions, Gibson's energy is just different.
And when he's been at his best, it's always been like, this guy might fucking lose it. This guy, don't fuck with this guy. This guy will do anything to get out of the situation, even in ransom, ransom leveraged that perfectly. I really, we're going to do ransom.
We should. Ransom leveraged that quality had perfectly where he's like, just this rich guy, he's got his life together. But now you have these kidnappers and they're fucking with them. And then finally he fucking snaps and he goes to the TV station and he does this thing and talks in the camera.
They're telling him not to do it. He does it anyway. Then he has the phone. Give me back my son.
And it's just, I just back to back rewatchables with giving me back my son references. It might be. But yeah. And that was the weapon was the movie that tapped into that.
And I think that's a really unique quality for him. I can't think of any other A plus lister who had that quality. Yeah. I always think of when you, if you want to put some piece of lethal weapon in the museum, I always think of the jumpers in this movie where he's just like, yo, you really want to jump.
Yeah. And you're just like, Jesus, is this going to happen? Because it's the first time where that movie kind of like leaves the earth. Because you don't know why they're like, it's kind of like this side scene.
And you know, lovers of Mirtas will get used to knowing rigs. And it gets to the sort of crux of the tension of the movie, which is essentially, you've got a guy who's contemplating taking his own life in rigs. And then you've got a guy who seemingly has it all in Mirtas, but Mirtas feels dead inside. And so he gets this guy in rigs who wake awakens something in him in his 50th year in his midlife crisis.
Yeah. That brings him back to life in some ways while also saving rigs his life. It's just like really, really, really tight, clean storytelling in that regard. One of the things I like about this movie, it feels very eighties on the one hand, but it doesn't feel too dated.
You know what I mean? Yeah. It's still really watchable. It's a movie that's almost 35 years old.
I don't want to say it could come out now. I think they would do some stuff differently. But it moves in a way that a movie now would move, you know. It's tight.
It's built around stars. It does some things that I think just got ripped off left and right for it. This movie rips off 48 hours in a lot of ways, even with some of the casting, some of the ways some of the scenes move, the Nick Nolte character in 48 hours, Jack Gates, Gibson's basically, they just flip it where they make Jack Gates like kind of the Reggie Ham and wild card guy, but even like way more of a degenerate and alcoholic and more of a death wish to Jack Gates had. But there's, you could tell Shane Black, he mentioned, wrote this in 85, there were a lot of revisions, stuff like that.
But you could feel the 48 hours influence in this movie, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is also the cool thing about this movie is it's like a very eighties movie in some ways, like some of the fashion, like the LA, you know, coke vibe of the Hollywood Hills. But it's very much rooted in the seventies.
And it's like as much of a Vietnam movie as there's a cop movie, which is kind of cool. Like, you know, one of my favorite novels is called Dog Soldiers by this guy, Robert Stone. And it's about veterans coming back to the States and dealing heroin. And each one of these guys in the movie, like Mr.
Joshua and Hunsacker and McAllister and Merton Riggs are dealing with Vietnam in their own way. And it's kind of awesome to see an action movie that is actually rooted with some kind of like sense of history to the characters. Like you know, you see that a lot. Another good thing, and it's very Shane Blackish and I feel like he's tried to take this moment and incorporated in a lot of other movies combined with the Joel Silver thing, which we should mention, who produced this, who did a bunch of great eighties, 90s stuff.
The way this movie starts, there's a girl, she's a helicopter shot, yeah, semi-topless. There's cocaine. She's in some sort of dreamlike state. You're definitely in LA.
Yeah. It's supposed to be Century City. Right? Yeah.
It seems like it's kind of cool because that's also where the diehard tower is. It's like all eighties action with Century City. Oh, yeah. And anytime you saw cocaine in a balcony, you just know, you know the girl's climbing on the balcony, it's happening.
She jumps off and just seems like she falls 130 stories into this car and it's like we're off. But you can see like Joel Silver's like, yes, this is like, you check this in my veins. This is like his dream way to start a movie and it all that feels very eighties to me. I don't know if even in like 1989 a movie starts this way.
This feels rooted in the early mid eighties where cocaine is everywhere and it just seems like a natural way to start a movie. It's like, oh yeah, of course, this girl's gonna do cocaine and jump off a balcony. I love how it does, you know, from the gutters of Los Angeles, like the grimy, like eating hot dogs and drinking Pepsi in the streets of like the beautiful condominium towers and the rich, like, like excessive life, like all the stuff in the nightclub where Mr. Joshua and McAllister are taking their meeting with Mendez, you know, like all the stuff that just seems like subterranean underground L.A.
and also like rich, excessive, coked out of their mind. L.A. It's weird that in the buddy cop movie genre, we saw this work better in TV than we did in movies for a long time. I used to love Starsky and Hutcher when I was a kid, the kind of back and forth with those guys, you know, is basically the foundation for what we would see in some of these movies.
Same thing with like, you know, the Duke brothers and Duke's a hazard where it's like, oh, you got to solve this thing and where there's going to be some banter and stuff like that, then Hill Street Blues was another one where Michael Warren's character, I forget the other guy, the black cop and the white cop, where they were kind of out and they would, they were kind of like lethal weaponry. Yeah. Spencer for hire had this kind of dynamic a little bit. Yeah, Vegas had it a little bit.
So, but it never really happened correctly in movies. And then I feel like running scared got lost in the history of this whole genre. It comes out a full year and a half before Lethal Weapon, I think, I honestly think it's just as good of a movie. I think it's just as entertaining and just as enjoyable.
The difference is it didn't launch this entire franchise kind of solar system that Lethal Weapon did. And they're making a 50-year show. Yeah. Yeah.
And it vaulted Gibson to super-duper star status, running scared kind of came and went. And the way that things are going now, they will make a young Riggs and Murtaugh in Vietnam limited series one of these days. You know what I mean? It's just like, so much IP.
It's like, you know, one of the things that's so cool though is we've been doing a lot of 80s action blockbusters this year specifically on ReWatchables. You guys just did Commando. And, you know, for the most part, you think about Schwarzenegger and then like the teardown is like Van Damn and those guys and like the big muscular action things. But the real story of those movies and the real story of what comes right afterwards with like the rock and up to like the big blockbusters like Armageddon is unconventional casting in those roles and finding like really interesting actors to play these very physical action movie parts, right?
Like, and it's like, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are just 35,000 times better than these roles necessarily demand them to be. Yeah. That's a good point. Well, Glover said the Glover character is important too and I think we got to put some context on that because you have the Cosby show comes in in in in 84 and now we have this nuclear normal upper-meter class black family that becomes the most successful TV show we have and was a game changer in a lot of ways because those kind of families just weren't on TV.
But Lethal Weapon family is very similar to the Cosby family where it's just like, yeah, he's got this wife and four kids and he's turning 50 and they come into the bathtub and they surprise him with a cake and that's it. Like, we didn't even get that in movies that much. We didn't get characters like Murtaugh. They were always white.
And I don't know. I just I feel like that. I feel like Murtaugh is a weirdly important character just in general in the big scheme of things. Yeah.
I mean, it's it was colorblind casting. The first one, there's the line when they said they weren't looking for a black actor, right? It was like just best available. And we get to that and casting one of suit, the kind of people who were being kicked around.
But the only time it's really mentioned if I remember correctly is when Dixie's house blows up and the kid is like, is it true that cop shoe black people remember and like, they like, they kind of like laugh it off. It becomes much a much bigger part of the second film because of the South African apartheid villains in the second movie. Murtaugh's race comes becomes like a little bit more of a significant factor. But in the first movie, it's just treated matter of fact, like it doesn't it's not really remarked upon as much and that in itself was kind of revolutionary.
We have the shame black thing, which threatened to become an era, but didn't totally become an era. No, but it like he was part of like that Joe Esther has like explosion of will pay top dollar for scripts that we think have blockbuster potential. And so this script I think goes for 250 K, even though it gets, you know, it gets rewritten and he wrote, he wrote Lethal Weapon 2, but that Lethal Weapon 2 script was heavily and almost entirely rewritten. He goes on to have like basically last Boy Scout long because good night, a bunch of movies that go increasingly higher and higher in their purchase price, much like Joe Esther Haas, who we talked about a lot on Basic Instinct Pot.
It feels like some sort of era and premiere magazine ties into this too and just like a general sense of like that screenwriters were actual people we should know. I would say until the late 80s, the only screenwriters I've ever heard of were Robert Tyler Wim Goldman. And when it was just like these anonymous people and then all of a sudden the screenwriter, what they paid for the movie, all this stuff became a became like part of the dialogue about the movie before we even knew about it. So now I think it's kind of gone back around to where it's almost closer.
I mean, look, I'm sure people disagree with me, but I think it's kind of almost gone back to where it was in like the 40s and the 50s, where it's not uncommon to have like writers rooms working on big superhero movies. It's not like the singular original idea that you sell for a million dollars and it's one movie and that's it. You know what I mean? It's more like, can we make 10 movies out of this?
Can there be a spinoff series? Can we do comics? Like, and there's tons of different writers working on like Captain America Incorporated. The Joel Silver piece of this.
This just seems like somebody we should have been friends with. Joel Silver? Yeah. I'm coming home in the body bag.
He rips up. For people to know, Joel Silver is obviously the inspiration for Soul Rub and X character to romance. It's a very important character for me and Bill. Which we saw Rub and X was a category for a while before David to Vincent Hannah.
Joel Silver just rips off commando all the lethal weapons, the first two diehards and predators, all the predators. There's just some of his highlights. Go look at his IMDB. He had a specific taste.
He did the matrix too. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually, I'm just talking about it in this whole run for, he was involved in 48 hours and had like a pretty legendary feud with Michael Eisner at one point about 48 hours.
And I think it's always been unclear if Eisner wanted to replace Eddie Murphy or not. There's always been a, he said she said stuff about that, but they were feuding to the point that eventually when they do who frame Roger Rabbit and Joel Silver was involved, he had to pretend he wasn't involved or Eisner wasn't going to greenlight it. Just this was an era where you had guys like Joel Silver and Don Simpson. You had pretty, pretty lit people making larger than age characters.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
I mean, we've, I think we've told some Don Simpson stories over the course of, of the run of this podcast like that we've read and it's just like him, Brockheimer, Silver and then our boys, the weird, like the arms dealers, like the Mario Kazan and stuff, like KZAR and stuff like that. Andrew Vachna and Mario. Sorry. Yeah.
Our dream narrative podcast trying to find out if these guys existed next on Gimmler, it's a 10 part series for these real people. Yeah. How many like attack choppers did they have to sell to make this like, to make ready? Oh my God.
They were laundering money for Saddam Hussein. Uh, and then Richard Donner, we got to talk about him. Yeah. Some of his highlights.
He directed this movie. He's, I think his first theatrical movie was The Omen, Green Start, a movie that we will do on the rewatchables at some point. I have a lot of thoughts. Omen's Superman, first two movies out of gate.
Omen's Superman. And Superman, that was probably the first time that Hollywood was like, we have this massive franchise. Let's take a chance on this young director at home versus give it to, you know, some sort of old, whatever. Um, so he does that.
He does inside moves. My favorite movie that I demanded that you watch and you never did. I know you haven't watched it yet. If I can say, I told you it was on Amazon Prime.
I apologize. I will watch it this week. If you want me to. I'm sorry.
How many times have I asked you for anything? Like nine times in my life. It was like, it was like Jason steps, he owns tweeting. Has these great tweets?
Can we hire for a blog? That took two weeks for you, for email them inside move. This is taking six months. I don't know.
I don't know. It's like, I don't know. It's like, I have to like kick you over the head with a frying pan to get you to do stuff sometimes inside moves is incredible. It's my favorite Richard Donner movie.
You've never seen it. Okay. I will watch inside moves tonight. And all of you out there who haven't seen inside moves.
You suck too. It's not just Chris. Prusa Craig. It's not.
If Craig has seen inside moves before me, I will retire from this podcast. I have not. Yeah. Thank you.
All I know is there is multiple scenes with the 1979 80 Golden State Warriors and inside moves. So how you haven't seen that movie is incredible to me. I fucking love that movie. Uh, he did Lady Hockey to the Goonies.
Mm hmm. And then basically is like, all right, I'm going to cash out now. He directed all four lethal weapons. Yeah.
I'm glad he did Maverick and movies like that. But basically he cashed in on the Lethal Weapon franchise. When I think of Premiere Magazine, I think of Maverick. I feel like they had like five issues dedicated to the making of Maverick.
It really did. It all of Premiere Magazine's checkpoints. I remember. I was like, is this going to be the greatest movie ever made?
And I went and saw it when I was kidding. I was like, these guys just play cards. Is that it? I'm glad fantasy isn't here because I feel like he would say a couple things about Lethal Weapon that hurt our feelings.
You know, he's snobby about action movies sometimes. I do. I think he really likes Lethal Weapon. Really?
Fantasy? Yeah. I don't know. This is somebody who is a major, awesome director who did really interesting work.
But there's never been a Richard Donner conversation ever. Yeah. You know, I think that he kind of comes up, it comes of age in that Spielberg blockbuster director era, you know, but he's not very closely associated with that Spielberg Lucas Scorsese Coppola group. And maybe he doesn't have a masterpiece inside moves aside.
Maybe he doesn't have the the jaws, the raging, the taxi driver, the whatever is like the thing that jumps him up a level, but is essentially the safest pair of hands in Hollywood for 15 years. 20 years. Yeah. One of the most commercial directors I think we've ever had.
And I think his movies feel like a little like safe, I don't even know, like, I mean, like I'm trying to think of like a comparison him. I think Zemeckis is a decent comparison point, but he never really even made his back to the future. I guess the weapon is his back to the future. But Zemeckis even had like the boy Wonder element to him, like when he was directing, he was like Spielberg's protege, Donner was also like worked with Spielberg, executive produced Goonies and everything.
Like it's not like he didn't have associations with these people, but for some reason has never been looked at really it seems in that same way that we look at like a Zemeckis or a Spielberg. You could tell me he probably made like two hundred and eighty million dollars on and I'd believe it. Yeah. I think he made some very smart choices over the years.
And I'm sure like after Lethal Weapon two, those guys were basically naming their price for three and four. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine what the Lethal Weapon three like perc package was? Oh my God.
Because two was a monster and we'll cover that when we do Lethal Weapon two. Roger. Oh, correct. Whirl back.
Did he get up to Donner? Two hundred million net worth for Donner. Wow. Fifty million dollar budget made a hundred and twenty million dollars.
Roger Ebert. Do you know the answer to this one? I think he liked it. Four out of four stars from Raj.
Incredible. His review is basically an orgasm. We just love this movie. And one quote was, this movie thrilled me from beginning to end.
It thrilled me too. I agree with him completely. So when he says beginning and he's like, this movie thrilled me from the moment I saw a tapas prostitute jump off of balcony after a lot of lines of cocaine. But yeah, I'm with you.
This movie also thrilled me from getting in. We're going to take a break and then we're going to do the categories. All right. Most rewatchable scene.
We'll start here. I just wrote it down as Riggs has a drug bust flips out the Christmas tree bust. It's bad Jane. Real.
You ain't real. Oh, you sure are a crazy son of a bitch. Crazy. Yeah.
Yeah. You want to see crazy? Yeah. Yeah.
That's a real bad job of real company. This is a real fucking gun. Okay. This seems amazing.
Yeah. You love a lot of things about this scene, including a side, a side actor who will get to with the D.I. Waiter's award. This is everything we want from Riggs.
We need, we establish in two scenes basically that this guy is a full fledged lunatic. He swallows a mouthful of cocaine on a switch plate. That's your introduction to him. Yeah.
In the fields. It's also, and I think we'll probably talk about, I want to talk about this for what's the stage of this. It is the, the Christmas element of this movie, which is pretty big, you know, bigger in this movie than I even think in Die Hard in some ways. So it's just like, what a moment.
And then it's got that, that energy that we were talking about, that wide eyed energy, where he does the three stooges bit with these guys. Yeah. And you're just like, what the fuck is this guy on? And well, the answer to that is he's on a mouthful of cocaine that he just put in his mouth on a switch plate again.
That is what a cop does. And it's so funny because like in a lot of copies, they're like, you know, like the big leap that they need to make is like, you can't use, man. You can't, don't get, don't get into your own shit. And Rick's is just like, I've already had three cores.
So this is kind of leveling me out. I've never seen a cop flip it on the bad guys before and then a couple other movies I've ripped this off since, but when he's doing the shoot him, shoot him and he's just yelling at him. I hold the gun on him. It's like, wait a second.
What's going on? I shoot him. I shoot him. I shoot him.
I shoot him. I shoot him. I shoot him. I shoot him.
I shoot him. I shoot him. Stop. I shoot him.
Grab him. Im gonna Armed up. Me. Okay.
Be quiet. Okay. I Tent up. no reason for this scene to even be in the movie.
It's just like, we need to prove how crazy Riggs is. And introduce Murtau, because the whole idea that they're introducing in the beginning, because I also love the scene where Murtau's in the office and all his cop buddies are like, 80s men cry, Raj, you gotta get in touch with your emotions and he meets Riggs. And the whole thing is, is Riggs trying to basically get a pension, forgetting a psycho pension, is what they call it? Or is he actually suicidal?
And the jumper scene is just basically both. Or not trying to draw a psycho pension. It's also one of the scenes that you kind of forget what's gonna happen as you're watching it, because it's so good. And then it's like, oh yeah, I forgot.
They actually do the jump. I gotta say, Chris, I mean, I could put this in one stage at best, but people in a movie jumping off a building onto that giant, what do we call those things? They're like the inflatable raft thing that they jump into, yeah, the big cushion. Has that ever not been awesome?
Every single time, it's great. It's also great, because they never show you that they've brought this inflatable cushion here. So like, you're just like, oh my God, is this like, is he gonna jump into a car? Is he gonna jump into a bale of hay?
Like what's happening? It was really, really, really great. I love that scene. I wish the actor in that scene was like, I wish it had been like Bill Paxton or somebody that we knew.
I wish it was Ellis from Die Hard. Yeah, it's kind of like the bad version of Ellis. I'm having a terrible time over at Nakatomi Plaza. Next scene is Riggs Muerta when Riggs comes over for dinner, not the dinner scene, but the after when they're hanging out in the boat and getting to know each other.
They're in a boat, but there's not on the water. They're just in a driveway. There's some good interplay in that. And then it's just, that's a chemistry scene.
That's why this movie works, because those two guys have chemistry. I'm gonna go home. I'll strike. We resolved anything here tonight?
Yeah, we resolved plenty. We resolved it with a white take-tapping garbage. Oh, Mr. Daughter's nose grass in the house.
It's illegal. You don't know a hell of a lot about boats. And, you gotta hold a nice family there. Thank you.
Little known fact is when I did my interview for Brantland, I told you I did a guy in law, I was from a thousand yards out. And you were like, oh my God. And you were like, I was only one of three guys in the world who could make that chat. Yeah.
Okay, cool. Wanna work with Robert Bays? The daughter dessert, I'm sorry, the daughter desert exchange, which, where is that? Is that in America?
Or are we in Saudi Arabia for that scene? What's going on? I think they shot it. It looks like they shot it.
White Sands, but maybe they shot it in the Mojave. I don't know. What are the coordinates? How do we get there?
I have the significance. I have no idea how we ended up there, how everyone's on the same page. If you ask me, that feels very jolt silvery. They're doing this downtown LA grimy urban movie.
And then jolt silvers like, we gotta go to the desert and have a chopper chase the limo. I mean, the thing is, look, we've lived there for, I've lived there longer than you. Yeah. I've also driven around way more of California than you.
You soccer, but in every part of Southern California, basically. To go to a place like that, that is like a two and a half hour drive. That is not like, hey, so leave downtown LA, take a right, take a left, get off at that third exit, and you're there in this sweeping white desert. You're driving for hours, hours.
What is the more awkward trip to the desert? This or seven? Oh. See seven?
Mm. Probably this, because I just, there's no where. It doesn't look like Palm Springs. It doesn't look like they're driving out to just East of LA.
It's ludicrous, but it's a really good scene. I like that we incorporate the sniper piece with rigs. Yes. I enjoy that he's on there just laying people out, and of course, he gets caught.
Very tough, 1987 technology, where they don't figure out a way for rigs to be able to communicate with Mertos. All of it is like, Roger, move, move, Roger. Right. Next scene is the, I just wrote rigs, escapes, kills everyone, strip, joint, shoot out, 101, shoot out.
This is my winner. This is incredible, 11 minutes. It's just non-stop. The movie just, all of a sudden, takes a giant two to cocaine, and we're off.
Yes, and the first line is when rigs in BC are finally, when rigs is being tortured by BC and Alliong. Alliong, like, you're just like, this is all of the 80s in one room. Yeah. Torture, we got unnecessary rain or water.
We got Gary, BC. There's no shirt on for no reason at all. Our hero with his hands over his head, but he's going to be able to get out of this, even though he's chained up. Yeah, and it's just great.
So you want to have a problem? Since we have Mertos. We don't get to eat, but I believe in being thorough. Yeah, I've heard that about you.
I love the strip joint part of it, where they just shoot the bartender, but strip joints are such a weird way to react. We talked about this for Terminator. It was just a rough decade for pedestrians and action movies. Oh, yeah.
And they're just kind of walking through it. It's like, oh, shoot this guy, shoot that guy go out. And then the 101 shoot out, it's kind of underrated. Like, I don't even, that's one of those we're just having lived here for almost two decades.
Like, how did they even pull that off? How did they get that many cars on the 101? Was that at like four in the morning when they're filming that? It definitely had to be in the middle of the night.
Yeah, exactly. And that was also, it just seems like, this is like the best decade for when action movies could seemingly take over a city. Yeah. It was just not, it's not like Atlanta or some like sort of like more anonymous looking place.
It's like, that is definitely like down the street from our rare offices. Yeah, that part of the 101 that they take over, I have never seen where it wasn't at least semi-busy. Yes. And they're just like, we're gonna shut this down and film four days of action movie scenes here.
Another highlight for this is Riggs running versus Tom Cruise running. We can break this down later or we can break this down now. So who do you think wins just in a 100 meter sprint? 87 Riggs versus 86 Cruz.
Yeah, Craig, cue the video team for this one. This is just a natural breakout. I think if you're doing like, you know, on baseball when they have, they can gauge the mile an hour coming off somebody's bat. If we're able to just gauge peak mile an hour, I guess they can do this with the NFL combine.
They're doing this in the NFL a little bit with DK Metcalf things like that. I think Riggs is just faster. I agree. I also think that it's notable that Riggs, I think for the last 30 minutes of this movie is barefoot, but it has none of the problems that John McLean does.
No. Yeah, it's a one choice time barefoot. John McLean's for the last half hour of die hard. Riggs is just like, I'm fucking, I'm like Carl Lewis.
Like watch out. I think if you're doing the hierarchy, Robert Patrick and Terminator 2 is one. Like I do think he might have been faster than Usain Bolt. Well, he was on them side by cybernetic organism.
But yeah, even like the actor himself, like he's just flying. He's really like, it's almost like it's own special effect. Who would you be like the most surprised by if like you found out this 80s actor was actually the fastest 80s actor? Most surprised.
Oh, Schwarzenegger. Cause he's got so much muscle. Yeah, Gibson, Gibson and Cruz are both short. So it's hard.
They can film it in certain ways where they're, it just seems like they're flying, but I don't know how many, how much ground they're actually covering. Cruz was really good at running for him. I think the firm, he probably peaks. Yeah.
But I think Riggs, he really does feel like he could have run all day. The endurance factor with Riggs and maybe the little cocaine was helping him. I think we also, we give Cruz a lot of credit cause Cruz has continued to run. I think gives us a slow down in a lot of ways.
He gives us a slow down. Cruz is still tearing off 440s in more of the worlds, you know? Right. I don't, I don't know if Mel Gibson ever, what did Cruz do?
He broke his, what did he break on that? He broke his ankle on in Michigan's ankle. Yeah, I think Gibson saw that he started laughing. He's like, I could have made that jump in few seconds.
And then the last re-watchable scene is, would he say Jack, would you like a shot at the title? One of my favorite just random movie lines, probably in any action movie. It's so good. Would you like a shot at the title?
It's not a walk around saying that to people. What do you say, Jack, John, the title? That scene is fucking insane. Just, just Danny Glover turning his front yard into an octagon and just being like, no cops are allowed to interfere.
It seems like there's 19 violations happening. There's violations of police conduct. There's a violation. So first time you watch it, you're just like, yeah, for sure.
This makes sense. Like I would be surprised if this happened, you know, but then when you do, when you think about it and all the cops are showing up and he's like, no, no, no, I take responsibility. He's like back off. It's amazing.
And apparently in the internet research for it, apparently there was four more minutes of the fight and they actually like cut it down cause it was like too much, too much fight. It was like the audience has worn out. I felt like it's long where it was. I can't imagine having- It's really long.
More minutes on it. And it culminates with the most 80s thing. The thing I think about most of the 80s is he's not dead yet. You know, it's like in die hard and lethal weapon.
The guy always comes back to get shot one last time. They can't resist. Even sleeping with the enemy has it. It goes through the 90s.
But it usually killed them at the end. I think it replaces the Red Sox beat in the Yankees. They just come back and sports history. The 2004 Red Sox beat.
Mr. Joshua comes back. Joshua just ending up killing Riggs and Bertha after losing with 40 cops on there. My most rewatchable scene is everything from Riggs escapes through the one on one shoot out.
What do you have? You know what? I'm going to go with one that you haven't mentioned. Okay, great.
I'm going to go with Hunsacker when he gets killed. The helicopter shoot out and Riggs running after the helicopter and emptying two clips into the Pacific Ocean. This is a scene that essentially you've chained black redoes in Iron Man 3 anyway. But I love just the backstory of the mercenaries running heroin back from Vietnam when they reconvene and decide that they're going to do that.
And just like him just being like, you know, you're going to spill, you're going to give me the name and then getting shot through the eggnog and just that chopper out of nowhere, which I have also some nitpicks about. But that scene is like the pullback. It's like the helicopter pullback from the estate and you see the whole cliffside and Riggs is just shooting out into the ocean. It's great.
Where do you think that was filmed? You would know better than me. It seems like Palace Verde, right? Palace Verde, yeah.
What about my guess? Yeah, that there's this weird mid 80s helicopter run we had that quickly ended with the Twilight Zone. But they got super ambitious with helicopter stunts. Yeah, and they had the desert too when the helicopter is basically riding on top of that car trying to fuck with it.
And you're just watching go, wow, this is super dangerous. What was the police helicopter movie? Was that Blue Thunder? Did you ever see that?
Yeah, I did. I ever see it. Who the fuck are you talking to? You're still mad about inside moves.
Inside moves. All right, so you have that one. A lot of people don't know this. It hasn't come out in, you know, some of the journalism about Grantland in the four years, but initially started as we were running heroin for you as part of the thing.
People thought it was a sports and pop culture site that tried to do so much. Just a cover story. But we were running heroin out of LA live for like three years. And nobody ever found out about it.
What's age the best? I'm gonna start here. I love when fucked up guys live in mobile home trailers. It was one of my favorite things about What's Upon a Time in Hollywood too.
If you really get it right, it just took for the certain character, you just get the watch out of them sitting on that depressing sofa with the TV that's too small, shaking the beer that's probably not cold enough. There's some chips. Always a dog. Always a sad dog that has the worst life ever.
If we'd ever see that dog again. But it's unflinchingly loyal. Yeah, who's feeding that dog? Who's taking care of it?
We're coming in to walk the dog twice a day for the three days that Riggs has gone. We don't know. We see the dog once. That's supposed to be Venice.
Like what beach do you think he's on? My guess would be Venice. But you could basically take that scene and intersperse it with Brad Pitt and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And it's the exact same trailer, whatever, right?
It looks the same. The same beats. He's only missing the can of Alpo. Gibson's NHL hair is phenomenal.
It's unreal. This is this stretch from 87 and then Yaira Miriaga basically ruined it. And then everybody kind of backed off and regrouped. But there's this five six year stretch of the giant blown out.
There's hair dryers. There's product. It's got to be longer in the back. Only a few people could really pull it off.
It's really impressive. I don't think it's a wig either. I think it was his real hair. It definitely was his real hair.
I have no idea how you even style it. Because it doesn't actually look like blown dry. It looks like it should be like slicked back almost, but like it just puffs out. Yeah.
It looks like he came off a motorcycle. Yes. With the hair. No, he did it.
It's great. I love the movie ends with a classic Elvis Christmas song. I think Elvis's Christmas content was completely underrated. It ends with I'll be home for Christmas.
I love that one. I love Blue Christmas. Elvis's Christmas album, I think is iconic. Should we do the Christmas in LA as what's the best now then?
Oh, yeah. Maybe please come home on the full Spectre album. Yeah. And like a lot of Shane Black movies, this is set during Christmas.
It's set during Christmas in LA, which is, as Bill and I know, and many people do know, it's like a very specific time in LA. Because obviously it's like, it's still 70 out, you know? But the city changes a little bit in Christmas. Like it is kind of this weird, beautiful vibe in LA at Christmas.
And it's also incredibly lonely. Like as Shane Black talks about really well, like he's just like a very natural pause in the years calendar. And he said that he was like, I think one time he was, he said that he was out, he was at a taco truck or something. And that he looked over and saw like a little Virgin Mary statue lit up with Christmas lights.
And that was like, he's like, if you look hard enough at Christmas, like there's all these little crazy, like beautiful signs of it. And it's just like, it is easily my favorite part about these, this and die hard is like just like the weird vibe of the Christmas. Like everybody in this movie says Merry Christmas to each other on this. It's just great.
It's a little less congested here too. It's a fun time to be in here. And then what stage of best, just the chemistry of these two guys. Yeah.
Yeah, I would say that like the, like my favorite example of this is when they're at the shooting range. That's pretty much as written, but they're banter and the way that they're going back and forth about talent. And they basically are making up a story about what Dixie may or may not have done that night with Amanda. And you're just like, these guys playing off each other while they're doing their little shooting drills and their games and stuff.
It's so cool. It's so great. She actually says shit. Right.
In other words, stage of best. Just the whole helicopter seeing the way it's shot, the cliff, the wide shots of it. There's just some really good filmmaking in this movie. They do just and they do so much of LA.
They do the beach. They do downtown. They do like Hollywood. It's great.
They do the Mojave Desert. Oh, wait. That's any other I would say the best for you. No, I had Christmas and the dynamic between the two guys were my favorite.
What stage of worst? Mel Gibson. Yeah, let's do Mel. So obviously, very troubled man.