Trivia

When Brion James was originally hired to play Requin, it was a very small role with only two lines. In an effort to give the character something that would make him stand out, James decided to speak in a horrible "cockney" accent. Sylvester Stallone loved it, and re-wrote the script to give Requin a much bigger role. The same thing happened with Face, played by Robert Z'Dar, who was originally not meant to appear after the opening scene but Sylvester Stallone and Andrei Konchalovsky took a liking to Z'Dar and thought his appearance was so striking he deserved a larger role in the film.

Director Andrei Konchalovsky was replaced toward the end of principal photography by Albert Magnoli. In his book of memoirs, Konchalovsky says that the reason he was fired was because he wanted to give the film a more serious tone than the producers wanted and, as such, his relationship with producer Jon Peters became untenable. Konchalovsky, however, has nothing but praise for Sylvester Stallone, who he states was a constant voice of reason on the set.

The scene where Tango faces an oncoming truck with nothing but a gun was borrowed from Police Story (1985), where Jackie Chan performed the stunt. As a "response," Chan would later reference the make shift zip-line prison escape moment in this film in a scene early in the third installment of the Police Story series, Supercop (1992).

Jack Palance jokingly showed his displeasure about filming this movie while on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992). He said that when he first got the script he was really excited about doing the movie since he had three nice scenes with Sylvester Stallone, but as soon as filming started all his scenes with Stallone were cut, and he didn't even see Stallone throughout the entire movie.

The glasses Sylvester Stallone wears early in the film are his own, not props. He usually wears contact lenses in his films. The lenses show that he is very near-sighted in one eye, less so in the other. Plus, he has astigmatism.