YMMV / Lethal Weapon 2

• Complete Monster: Arjen Rudd and his bloodthirsty head of security Pieter Vorstedt are powerful drug traffickers who double as the ones responsible for the death of Martin Riggs' wife. Arjen Rudd hides his criminal activities under his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs from apartheid South Africa, and has no qualms unleashing Vorstedt to kill anyone in his way, from one of his failed minions to nearly an entire precinct of cops, the carnage of which Vorstedt approaches with casual vicious glee. Arjen Rudd even has Riggs's current girlfriend Rika drowned by Vorstedt, smugly trying to claim "diplomatic immunity" at the end when Vorstedt is dead and he's defeated.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Leo Getz earned this reaction, with audiences finding him funny and endearing. Sadly, the sequels turned him into a Base-Breaking Character, as the enhanced screentime for Leo made what seemed good in small doses very annoying instead.
• Even Better Sequel: Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, as well as the late Richard Donner, all considered this to be the best in the series.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Riggs mocks Rudd's racism and calls him "Aryan". Cut to 2006, and Mel Gibson is in hot water for making several racist remarks during his arrest. Cut to 2010, and he's in even more hot water for making even more racist statements during an argument with his girlfriend.
  • The original ending is now this, when you discover that Riggs does die in the second season finale of the TV series Continuity Reboot.
  • This won't be the last time that Dean Norris plays a cop who gets murdered by drug-trafficking white supremacists.
• Moral Event Horizon: Vorstedt crosses it when he drowns Rika, and later reveals that he was the one who killed Riggs's wife.
• Retroactive Recognition: Tim Cavanaugh, one of the cops in Riggs and Murtaugh's precinct who gets assassinated, is played by Dean Norris, who would later gain recognition as Hank in Breaking Bad.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Plenty of fans liked the Mauve Shirt detectives, a colorful bunch played by some notable action movie actors and would have liked to see them to play bigger roles in the movie or (if more than one of them had survived it) the franchise in general.
  • Hans is an Affably Evil Badass Driver played by popular character actor Mark Rolston. After the opening scene, some fans would have liked seeing him and Pieter be Co-Dragons, but instead, he is quickly subjected to a You Have Failed Me fate.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film centers around South Africa still being an apartheid state, which eventually ended by the early 90s.
• Values Dissonance: Riggs' "courtship" of Rika starts out with manly initiative and is portrayed as wacky antics combined with Love at First Sight in the name of love, but for modern audiences may go right into creepy Stalker with a Crush territory, particularly when he makes a scene in the grocery to force her to come with him, a stranger she barely knows, to his trailer home on the beach, while at the same time painting a target on her back.

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