24. LETHAL WEAPON
Directed by Richard Donner (1987)

Mel Gibson is crazy. That might as well have been the tagline for this buddy-cop flick, which starred Gibson as a suicidal cop good at making people dead and Danny Glover as the unlucky family man who gets to be his partner. Together, they go after a similarly crazy Gary Busey (whose gleaming choppers may or may not be the lethal weapon of the title). Richard Donner, working from Shane Black's taut, quippy script, keeps the proceedings moving at a muscular pace. This is the film that took Gibson and polished him into an American movie star.