Film's soundtrack includes Elvis Presley song I'll Be Home for Christmas. Darlene Love, who plays Murtaugh's wife, was background dancer in Elvis' production Elvis (1968).
Each movie of the 'Lethal Weapon' series features a goon with glasses. Here it is the balding goon who delivers the line "He has a grenade!" during the desert scene and is later shot in the club by Riggs.
When McAllister's car is flipped by the bus, the hole in the floorboard for shooting out the section of telephone pole used to flip the car can be seen. The section of pole can be seen rolling down the street as the car is flipping over.
During the final chase scene between Riggs and Joshua, Riggs
is carrying an HK MP5 submachine gun while Joshua has a CAR-15/M-4 type rifle. In this scene, both weapons have the same firing sound effect, which is not the case in real life as the CAR-15/M-4 has a lower cyclic rate and fires a different round.
In the Director's Cut, Riggs reports on the police car radio that he is on the way to the sniper call. The next scene draws away from the car showing Riggs en route to the scene. The antenna holes in the roof & trunk are filled with rubber plugs. This is standard for decommissioned police cars after the police radios & antennas are removed.
Martin Riggs: Hey, look friend, let's just cut the shit. Now we both know why I was transferred. Everybody thinks I'm suicidal, in which case, I'm fucked and nobody wants to work with me; or they think I'm faking to draw a psycho pension, in which case, I'm fucked and nobody wants to work with me. Basically, I'm fucked.
Lethal Weapon is based on a screenplay by American screenwriter and film-maker Shane Black. It was followed by three sequels, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998).
Q
A Note Regarding Spoilers
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The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags have been used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.
Q
What is the mental difficulty that Riggs is having?
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In the film it's briefly explained a few times that Riggs' wife (Victoria Lynn) had died recently. The circumstances of Victoria's death are not revealed in this film but the incident has plainly thrown Riggs into a deep depression that's affecting his everyday life and his work and has made him suicidal. There are definitely some psychological models that could be applied to Riggs himself -- one could be post-traumatic stress disorder/syndrome which many people who go through a traumatic incident can develop suddenly.However, Riggs still working and solving drug-dealing cases but he often loses control, like we see in the scene at the Christmas tree lot -- he demands that his backup team shoot the crook holding him hostage, seizes the guy's gun and growls about shooting him after he surrenders. At the end of the film, having defeated his and Roger's enemies, Riggs has regained some of his self-control. As he tells Roger in the last scene of the film, he's not really "crazy" but has come out of his depression to a certain degree.As we see in the 2nd film, he still retains some of his crazy/uncontrolled personality but he's no longer suicidal or feels the urge to kill people unnecessarily, like the guy at the Christmas tree lot. His methods of police work might be wholly unorthodox or exceed authority but he's clearly not feeling homicidal.