Still lethal after all these years?

The time has come, once again, for audiences to reassess their commitment to mindless action: the fourth movie in the Lethal Weapon series has finally arrived. As expected, the decreasingly dynamic duo of Glover and Gibson lead the all-star cast on yet another romp in and around Los Angeles in pursuit of some unequivocally vile villains and their morally and intellectually vacuous plots.

This time around, the villains are part of a Chinese triad. Mel's arch-nemesis is, refreshingly, a rather nice-looking man in one of those suave mandarin outfits and some prayer-beads, retro-fitted with a garrote wire. His mission is to counterfeit Chinese money so that he can pay a corrupt Chinese general in order to liberate his family from life-imprisonment.

Why do our dashing heroes care? Slavery. In order for the villain to capture the man he's hired to do the artwork for the printing press, he must conduct business with a ship full of poor sweat sho-bound workers in order to get the artist's family over to the U.S. Don't worry, the plot is not the most important aspect anyway.

On the homefront, Renee is pregnant, and Mel doesn't know if he should ask her to marry him. Chris Rock is recruited as a new detective who is crucial because he knocked up Danny's daughter and spends the whole movie trying to get on the good side of his father-in-law-to-be. Joe Pesci plays the same gratuitous doofus he has played in the previous two movies.

This film is on par with with the others in the series; audiences are presented with yet another chance to watch Mel beat up everything near him including himself for a couple hours.

There are no real surprises here except that the film makers didn't skimp at all on the action, and the movie is overall well paced and well shot. Under no circumstances should this movie be underestimated on the grounds that it is the fourth in the series. Underestimate it because it's mindless action, if good action.