The Lethal Weapon franchise featured plenty of bloodshed, but the biggest body count in the series belongs to a surprising sequel. Like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, the Lethal Weapon movies started seriously dark and gradually grew lighter with each new sequel. While the original Lethal Weapon saw Martin Riggs weep over the death of his wife with a loaded gun in his mouth, Lethal Weapon 4 saw him imitate an Asian accent in the franchise’s most cringe-worthy moment of attempted comedy. However, this didn’t necessarily impact the violence of the series.

While all of the movies in the franchise are bloody compared to Lethal Weapon’s TV adaptation, there is no denying that the violence depicted in Lethal Weapon 3 isn’t as brutal as the first movie’s killings. Lethal Weapon is a dark, gritty cop thriller, whereas the later sequels are much more broadly comedic in tone. However, although the violence in Lethal Weapon is a lot nastier and more impactful than most of the kills in Lethal Weapon 4, this isn’t necessarily reflected in the body counts of each movie in the series. When it comes to counting up corpses, the Lethal Weapon franchise’s bloodiest outing is a surprisingly close call.

Lethal Weapon 2 Has The Franchise’s Highest Death Count

With a staggering 34 deaths, Lethal Weapon 2 has the highest number of deaths in the series. While the sequel Lethal Weapon 5 might be able to outdo this, Lethal Weapon 2’s high number of casualties mostly come from the 20 henchmen that Riggs and Murtaugh kill during the sequel’s violent action sequences. Almost all of the villains are shot to death, and most of these killings are committed by Riggs - although Murtaugh does manage to rack up a respectable 8 killings during Lethal Weapon 2’s 2-hour runtime.

How Lethal Weapon 2's Death Count Compares To The Other Movies

Lethal Weapon 2 comfortably outstrips its competitors, with the sequel gaining 8 deaths on the original Lethal Weapon’s 26 casualties. However, the final movie of the series so far is nastier than many viewers might recall. In of tone, Lethal Weapon 4 is the softest, silliest movie in the series but, despite this, the cartoony sequel racks up 23 deaths. That is almost as many as the far darker original Lethal Weapon, even though the sequel feels nothing like its 1987 predecessor.

In contrast, Lethal Weapon 3’s body count proves just how much the landscape of the action genre changed in the ‘90s. With a drop-off from 34 deaths to a mere 14, it’s pretty blatantly obvious that the creators of Lethal Weapon 3 wanted to soften the movies and broaden the appeal of the series. While the ‘80s were the heyday of gory, R-rated action movies, the ‘90s saw studios start to learn the value of the PG-13 rating. While Lethal Weapon 3 was still too violent to earn that family-friendly rating, its lowered body count proves that the Lethal Weapon series intended to pivot in this direction.