Reviews: DVD

Lethal Weapon II

Directed by Richard Donner, starring Mel Gibson, Danny Glover

The first Lethal Weapon was a hit that shrewdly mixed breathless editing with the genuine screen chemistry of its lead pair. Here, in the sequel, director Richard Donner knows just what to do. Simply reintroduce us to police partners Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh and then throw them into all sorts of stunts punctuated with one-liners and the occasional gunfight.

When we first catch-up with the pair they are in a car chase in Murtaugh's wife's car. Riggs hounds Murtaugh to jam his foot on the gas much to the driver's agitation. This acutely sums up the characters: We've got the risk-taker coupled with the middle-aged family man who by some twist of fate wound up with a nut as his best buddy. There is some semblance of a plot, which involves corrupt South African diplomats, but that's not really the point of this exercise.

The objective here is for the audience to reacquaint themselves with two guys whose rapport is infectious. In addition to a flurry of fists, an exploding toilet and showdowns with bad guys, Joe Pesci provides further comic relief as a manic criminal.

Ben Davey

Stranger Than Fiction

Directed by Marc Forster, starring Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a stiff-collared IRS agent who lives by the book until he discovers his life is one. Soon after he starts hearing a phantom narrator recounting his life, he learns that its final chapter is soon to be written. Upon discovering that his life storyline will be one of death and taxes, the condemned Crick enlists the book-smarts of literary guru Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) to track down this mystery author.

On his mission to find this novelist turned biographer and talk her out of writing him off for good, the super-stuffy Crick very predictably learns to live life to the fullest. But it turns out that the tale of this taxman concludes with a few novel twists.

Funnyman Ferrell performs persuasively in his first staid role as the buttoned-down Crick, while Hoffman's brilliant but batty character convincingly conveys a genius/madness dynamic born of a little too much bookworming. Emma Thompson's performance as the neurotic novelist infatuated with doom and gloom and her own writer's block is riddled with clever quips and bits of wit.

Making fine use of the "little-did-he-know" storytelling device, Stranger Than Fiction is a story about the unexpected within a story that is unexpected that brings the humdrummer turned hero Harold Crick to life in surprising ways.

Erik Nilsson

(China Daily 04/25/2007 page20)