Mel Gibson, 70, Sparks Fears with Newest Vow

Mel Gibson isn’t ready to put down his badge just yet.

At 70, the Hollywood icon is still determined to bring Lethal Weapon back for one more round — but his plans to return as wild-card LAPD cop Martin Riggs are already raising questions about whether the veteran star should still be throwing himself into action scenes.

Gibson has confirmed that Lethal Weapon 5 remains very much alive, even though the long-delayed sequel has been stuck behind the scenes for years.

The actor, whose blockbuster career also includes Mad Max and Braveheart, says he helped finish the screenplay with writer Richard Wenk following the 2021 death of longtime Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner.

And if the movie finally gets off the ground, Gibson could end up doing double duty as both star and director.

That would put him back alongside Danny Glover, who played Riggs’ long-suffering partner Roger Murtaugh throughout the hugely popular franchise.

But with Gibson now 70, some insiders reportedly have concerns about how much physical punishment the actor should take for another action movie.

“There are fans who would love to see Mel back as Riggs, but there are also fears that at 70 he is simply too old to throw himself back into the kind of action that made Lethal Weapon famous,” a source close to the project told RadarOnline.

“Nobody wants him getting hurt trying to prove he can still do what he did decades ago.”

Another Hollywood insider said the bigger question may be whether audiences are ready to watch an aging Riggs dive back into dangerous police work.

“The concern is whether audiences really want to see Mel doing action at this age,” the insider said.

Still, Gibson isn’t pretending Riggs and Murtaugh are the same men viewers met back in 1987.

In fact, he says the new movie would lean heavily into the fact that both characters have gotten older.

“The characters are quite different. They’re older,” Gibson told Collider. “One’s retired. The other one’s on a desk job. He’s putting on too much weight, and it’s low-tech.”

That means fans shouldn’t necessarily expect the pair to spend two hours outrunning giant fireballs and diving from exploding buildings.

“It doesn’t get into the big explosions and all this sort of stuff,” Gibson explained.

But he insists the story would still pack plenty of punch.

“It still has the energy and, I think, drive of a big action film,” he said, comparing its intensity to his brutal 2006 adventure Apocalypto.

Gibson also believes the unfinished sequel has something the earlier films may not have had.

He called the fifth script “better than all the others.”

Unfortunately for fans, there is one major problem: getting the movie made.

Gibson admitted the project remains trapped in what he described as “industrial film h—,” despite the screenplay being completed.

The fifth movie had originally been developed by Donner, who directed all four previous Lethal Weapon films before his death at age 91.

According to Gibson, Donner was still working on the sequel when he died.

“So I got together with the writer, and we completed it thinking, ‘What would Donner do?’” Gibson said.

The franchise has always stood apart from traditional buddy-cop movies because Riggs and Murtaugh weren’t invincible superheroes, Gibson argued.

Riggs was reckless and emotionally unstable, while Murtaugh famously worried that he was getting “too old” for the dangerous life around him.

Gibson believes those vulnerabilities helped make the films work.

“We were used to these tough guys on film who kind of had it all together,” he said of 1980s action heroes.

But with Lethal Weapon, he said, “one was crazy, and the other was scared,” allowing the story to go deeper than the typical action flick.

And Gibson says Donner himself wanted him to keep the franchise alive.

The actor recalled the late filmmaker making one final request about the series.

“Donner, God rest his soul, he said to me in this deep voice, he said, ‘Hey kid, if I drop off the perch, you’ll take this over, won’t you?’”

Gibson said he brushed off the grim suggestion at the time.

“I said, ‘Shut up! You’re not going anywhere.’”

Then came the heartbreaking reality.

“And of course he did.”

Now, more than three decades after Riggs and Murtaugh first became one of Hollywood’s most famous cop duos, Gibson appears determined to honor that promise.

Whether moviegoers will actually get to see a 70-something Riggs back in action, however, remains one of Hollywood’s biggest unanswered sequel questions.