I watched Lethal Weapon for the 30th time last week. It never fails to satisfy. It has competent direction from Richard Donner, a first-class script from Shane Black, and the ever-superb Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as the leads, with Gary Busey as the villainous Mister Joshua – and quite a few un-PC fag jokes and racial slurs, not to mention meritorious violence executed with real relish and venom.

Previous action films were of the Commando variety – infinite ammo magazines, all hand-to-hand reduced to wild haymakers between hugely-muscled men with tiny eyes. Lethal Weapon demonstrates Shane Black’s attention to minutiae, pragmatic detail, methodology. Thus, Riggs’ and Murtaugh’s second scene together,

they walk through the police underground car park and compare handguns, Riggs’ eyes flicker down and he asks: “What you got there?” – the interest of a professional.

Riggs is the centrepiece of this film, a suicidal man at his prime of life – he exists in a state of violent equilibrium, his lust for his own death projected out onto the world with equal intensity; kept just about within check with a certain wry humour at himself. Although Lethal Weapon is basically an action film, the determining subtext is that of suicide – the entire film is structured around Riggs’ desire to die. Murtaugh, the family man surrounded by life, instinctively recoils from this destructive aura; Riggs’ violence towards the bad guys is merely a modulation of the suicidal impulse – if he was not fighting them, he would kill himself (Nietzsche: Unter friedlichen Umständen fällt der kriegerische Mensch über sich selber her, that is, In times of peace he warrior makes war on himself). It is only through defeating darker versions of himself (ex-Nam mercs), the aptly-named Shadow Company, his own shadow self, that he comes to some kind of peace with himself.

The final ruck with Mr Joshua is, I think, the earliest example of fairly realistic hand-to-hand combat in cinema – lots of grappling and use of makeshift weaponry.

Los Angeles looks horrible to a European like me, a sprawling desolation of hookers & crime and straight roads to more hookers & crime, which makes Riggs’ craziness & rage perfectly reasonable.

The achievement of Lethal Weapon, like other action classics (e.g. Predator) is to do with the vital subtext. On the one hand it is a pure action film; on the other, it’s Trois Couleurs Bleu – a redemption tale of suffering, self-destruction, and arduous rebuilding and connection.

You could see Lethal Weapon as the tale of Juliet Binoche’s character Julie, having survived a car crash that took out her family, rediscovering purpose through deeds of violence against the scum of the Parisian banlieue, finally ending in a showdown against Irene Jacob from Trois Couleurs Rouge

where they roll around in a kind of mud pit, ripping each other’s clothes off as Danny Glover watches in a blood-stained Die Hard-style wifebeater vest.