 DATE: When Riggs and Murtaugh discover that most of the cargo inside  the container is money, Murtaugh notes that "...theyre all  $1,000.00 bills." Presuming that the movie is set in 1989, the year  of its release (see trivia), all denominations of US currency above  $100.00 had been withdrawn from circulation for twenty years. Large  denomination bills are now mostly in the hands of collectors and  dealers. The huge quantity of such large bills would immediately  draw suspicion no matter what their source. Part of the reason for  the withdrawal was because the large denominations were not widely  used enough; other motives include making it more difficult for  criminal traffic in large amounts of currency, just the sort of  situation depicted in the film.