Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo

A flippant movie about brutal, stressed-out L.A. cops does not exactly deserve a social consciousness award for Warner Bros. at this point. But otherwise, this third-generation sequel is no more offensive than its progenitors. It's also not as original or entertaining.

Gibson is still the manic partner, who would just as soon sucker-punch a suspect as read him his rights ("You have the right to remain unconscious," he tells one arrestee). Glover is still a walking lump of offended dignity as the serious partner, who's now threatening to retire. Pesci, with his abrasively grating, nasal voice and unidimensional comic acting style—every action leads to an unequal and opposite overreaction—herewith wears out his welcome. Having played a shady accountant in Lethal 2, he returns as a real estate salesman who tries to help Gibson and Glover track down a ring of arms thieves who are stealing impounded automatic weapons from the police. Russo (One Good Cop) is the proverbial pretty face (though Gibson, in his ponytail, is hard to upstage).

As a tough, internal-affairs cop meddling in a gun case, Russo never seems convincing, nor is she athletic enough to pull off the scene where, using martial arts, she manhandles five villains.

Richard Donner, who directed the first two Lethal films, handles this one too in the sort of chaotic, overloud, violent style that producer Joel Silver is known for (Die Hard, 48 HRS., The Last Boy Scout, etc.). Writers Jeffrey (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) Boam and Robert Mark (The Power of One) Kamen, show a moronic sense of humor and language. The expletive "Oh, s—t!" is used as an all-purpose punch line, and Russo's main device for showing toughness is to swear a lot. The Boam-Kamen wit never gets more sophisticated than having Gibson say to Russo, as he ushers her into a men's room for a confrontation, "Let's have a meeting in my orifice."

There's a romantic subplot involving Gibson and Russo, but its chemistry is of the lukewarm Kool-Aid variety. Even the frequent, frenetic chase scenes are barely distracting, since they're shot from mostly confusing, difficult-to-track angles.

Although Gibson and Glover still interact with ultimate buddy-movie camaraderie, their byplay is so lamely written as to dilute even their considerable appeal. (R)

Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez, Isaach de Bankolé, Roberto Benigni

While he is usually the most stubbornly unconventional of directors, Jim (Mystery Train, Down by Law) Jarmusch has in this case turned out a movie that could easily have been made for cable TV. It is a series of vignettes involving late-night taxi rides in Los Angeles, Rome, Paris, New York City and Helsinki, Finland. Ryder is the chain-smoking, ditzy driver in the L.A. sequence, Rowlands her casting director passenger (who just happens to be looking for a ditzy young actress to cast in a movie).

The most consistently funny bit is the Rome ride, where Benigni (Down by Law) picks up priest Paolo Bonacelli in the middle of the night and decides he (the driver) has gone too long without confession. While Bonacelli squirms uncomfortably in the backseat, the animated, comically expressive Benigni recounts his life of sin in great, often hilarious detail, going back to his boyhood on a farm, where in search of "sexual release" he employed such means as pumpkins and a sheep named Lola ("a very gentle, pretty sheep," he specifies).

The Paris sketch features De Bankolé (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired), a charismatic actor who is now something of a star in France. Bankolé ends up ferrying Beatrice (Betty Blue) Dalle, a tangy, Susan Sarandon type intriguingly playing a capricious blind woman.

Mueller-Stahl (Avalon) is the driver in the New York City sequence, an immigrant so incompetent as a driver (he hardly knows what direction Brooklyn is in, let alone how to get there) that his passenger, Giancarlo (Do the Right Thing) Esposito, finally switches places with him in frustration. But it's only when Esposito picks up Perez (White Men Can't Jump), his sister-in-law, that things get really out of hand.

Nobody familiar appears in the Helsinki segment, unless you're a big fan of Matti (Zombie and the Ghost Train) Pellonpää. That tale is also the most remote in content, depending on apparent Finnish class-system jokes, as three drunken factory workers regale a driver with variegated sob stories.

Overall, the sporadically entertaining collection suggests a Fellini-esque notion executed by distinctly sub-Fellini talent. (R) (In appropriate languages, with subtitles)

Drew Barrymore, Sara Gilbert, Cheryl Ladd, Tom Skerritt

Barrymore and Gilbert are California teens with self-image problems, parent problems, sex problems, driving problems and script problems.

Barrymore is a flashy, extroverted orphan who one day just ups and moves in with her mousy high school friend Gilbert (Roseanne) and Gilbert's parents, the emphysemic, suicidally depressed Ladd and the alcoholic pedophile Skerritt. Predictable consequences ensue, including graphic lovemaking scenes between Skerritt, 48, and Barrymore, 17, that only Humbert Humbert could admire.

Director Katt (Stripped to Kill) Shea and her producer-cowriter-partner Andy Ruben make only the feeblest attempt to rationalize the leering tone of the film, not to mention its incoherent plot. Barrymore's herky-jerky acting style makes her seem like a human in Claymation form. The ill-used Ladd has the fewest lines and is therefore the movie's most sympathetic character.

Even Ladd can't be taken seriously in this context, though. While the ending features a double tragedy that ought to be heartbreaking, this film is so shoddy and remote, it never generates real emotion. (R)

Nina Siemaszko, Wendy Hughes, Tom Skerritt, Robert Davi

Here's a real off the old turkey. Unaccountably inspired by the widely derided 1990 film Wild Orchid, this film too is countersexy, wretchedly acted and dull.

That's about all they have in common. There is a new cast (who would have thought it possible to miss Mickey Rourke?) and a new plot, totally unrelated to the original. Writer-director Zalman (9½ Weeks) King is about the only thing the same, to his everlasting discredit.

Siemaszko (Tucker) is a sweet but aimless Califonia teenager who travels with her jazz musician, junkie father, played by Skerritt. (Hey, Tom, get a life! Better still, get a new agent.) Through him she meets a madam, Hughes (Boundaries of the Heart), here demeaning herself and her otherwise admirable body of work. In a convoluted series of events that would test even Danielle Steel's credulity, the pudgy, bland Siemaszko, who's nowhere near seeming like a femme fatale, eventually becomes a star of Hughes's stable and then the girlfriend of the high school football quarterback. (R)