[Note: We need to hurry up and do this. Eastwood is 92.]
And yes, I got the idea from The Expendables. But this time it is the characters (not just the actors) who are all being thrown into one insane movie.
The plot: There is a crime wave in the US, but only a few cops are beginning to notice a pattern. The crimes all seem to fall just short of the level of felonies, so they are calculated not to draw the attention of the Feds.
One of the cops putting the pieces together from stories reported in different cities is Detroit's Axel Foley. Another is John McClane, Jr., in New York. Yet another is Martin Riggs, in LA. Since each of these cops is known to be wild and unreliable, their insistence that there is a pattern is dismissed by their superior officers.
When yet another crime that fits the pattern takes place in Miami, they all converge there to investigate. But Mike Lowrey is already there and he and his partner Marcus Burnett find their arrests foiled by the interference of all these other cops.
They end up in a 4-way stand off. As if on cue, they all pull their guns at each other and say, as one, "Freeze! Police!"
Once they finally all prove to each other that they are, all, in fact, police-- and that they have all noticed the same pattern of crimes, and all believe there is one force behind all of them-- news of another crime back in Los Angeles sends the team all over there.
This time, the Rush Hour team of Lee and Carter are already responding, but this time, our squad calls ahead. Meanwhile, the long plane flight from Miami to San Francisco allows the team the chance to corroborate their facts, and also form some new friendships-- and frictions.
In Los Angeles, the trail leads to a terrifying place-- an FBI office! And not just any office, that of one "Dirty" Harry Callahan in San Fransisco! His lifetime of fast-and-loose policing, but also public acclaim protecting him from being fired, has lead the FBI to hire him on, so they can keep him-- but on a short leash and a desk job.
The squad has to forge a plan and sneak into his office to find proof one way or the other. Of course, they get caught-- not even all these supercops are a match for the original-- and of course he's innocent. He's being set up to be framed for the whole thing if it goes sour. After all, who has more method or opportunity that a fast-and-loose man on the FBI's inside, or more motive than someone being kept like a dog with a muzzle?
Harry agrees that none of the crimes reach the level of federal interest on their own, but together, they do. He pitches the theory up the chain of command and is shot down.
Harry agrees that none of the crimes reach the level of federal interest on their own, but together, they do. He pitches the theory up the chain of command and is shot down.
Eager to clear his name, Harry takes charge of the case. They can use the FBI's resources, but they have to be sneaky about it.
To this end, they enlist Penelope Garcia ("Criminal Minds"), who works for the FBI's serial-killer-catching unit but who also happens to be a computer genius. She collects all their data and crunches it. She says the reason only the few of them have caught on is that the cities that are targeted for each crime are randomized to as to avoid creating a pattern: "The pattern is that there IS no pattern; but it's too random to be unplanned. You have to plan for something to be this random."
She says that together, the clues all point to one of the few major US cities they have not been to: Chicago.
She says that together, the clues all point to one of the few major US cities they have not been to: Chicago.
There, they enlist the help of Federal Marshall Samuel Gerard ("The Fugitive"). The crime hub turns out to be hidden in the bowels of the complex of O'Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country. This allows the criminals to quickly dispatch to any city in the country, and circumvent all the TSA and security protocols. At the airport, there is a shootout.
The bad guys take a plane and almost hijack it, but it is stormed by our squad and the bad guys are apprehended by force. It takes off but they force an emergency water landing on Lake Michigan, with the amazing Chicago skyline in the background.
The bad guys take a plane and almost hijack it, but it is stormed by our squad and the bad guys are apprehended by force. It takes off but they force an emergency water landing on Lake Michigan, with the amazing Chicago skyline in the background.
The final scene has all of our hero cops posing for a picture for the press, each holding up the badge of his city.
One of the nice things about this idea is that it creates a Mt. Rushmore of sorts of some of the most popular Black actors in Hollywood, all in one place: Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, and Danny Glover. Since Chris Rock has been in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, he can come along too, but we understand if he does not want to be in scenes with Will Smith (given their, um, incident at the Oscars).
If we want to keep that going even further, we can include Denzel Washington as the Big Bad at the end. And we can also work in Morgan Freeman's Detective Alex Cross character in a cameo, or even his detective character from Se7en... but I would like to keep this to only those characters that haven been in at least 3 movies. Once you let in just any movie cop, where does it end? You have to draw a line somewhere.
Anyway, some of these series have ended, and some have sputtered. The solution, I think, is to throw them all in a blender and hit "frappe."
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