Metacritic reviews

There is enough material to provide grins and, sometimes, guffaws. Along the way, there are jokes and sight gags involving convenience-store robberies, ocean debris, dandruff commercials, Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," frequent-flyer miles, Nazis, Ninja Turtles, Oprah, Mike Tyson and Mr. Potato Head. And, of course, the favorite targets of this particular genre: mimes and doughnut-eating cops.

There may not be a laugh every minute, but there are enough to satisfy most devotees of the relentlessly silly, tasteless school of parody.

But the Lethal Weapon films, with their hyperbolic explosiveness, lurid repartee, and quasi-loco Mel Gibson hero, are already winking at the audience. (Last year’s spoofy, ragtag Lethal Weapon 3 practically turned its own slovenliness into a running gag.) The only way to make light of them is to exaggerate the cartoon funkiness that’s already at the center of their appeal. It’s no wonder this Weapon ends up shooting blanks.

Obviously, gags rather than plot are central to a movie like LOADED WEAPON, but even so, neither the writing nor the acting is strong enough here. Estevez and Jackson are adequate as deadpan actors who remain oblivious to the chaos around them, but they lack the super-straight persona that makes Leslie Nielsen so effective as a dimwitted cop in the NAKED GUN movies. Often the jokes seem to barely squeak over their heads when they should fly.

More an imitation than a parody, this would-be comedy is very short on laughs.

While past parodies like Airplane! and the marginally worthwhile Hot Shots filled out down time with slapstick visuals and spastic throwaway gags, Loaded Weapon is content to lumber along at its own boring pace: you end up checking your watch between jokes, and there's nothing funny about that.

This is a would-be comedy that's not as funny (nor as satirical) as the movies that inspired it.

Watching Loaded Weapon 1 is like playing Trivial Pursuit with experts. It's exhausting.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again; this Loaded Weapon fires only dumb-dumb bullets.

A buddy cop parody of the lowest possible caliber, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 empties its chamber but only nicks its enormously deserving target. It's a fusillade of tired jokes and cheap shots, primarily meant as a burlesque of "Lethal Weapon," but "Basic Instinct," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "48 Hrs." also come in for some lame bashing from director Gene Quintano.