Corrected entry: The bus is being chased down by an entire police force and the get away plan is to attach the bus to a helicopter? Do the police not have helicopters in LA? Yes they do.
Corrected entry: When Travolta and Jackman are driving the TVR Tuscan, Travolta tells Jackman to drive. He says he "couldn't possibly drive this thing". He then proceeds to crunch the gears and drive it flawlessly - the chase scene that then follows shows some impressive driving though the streets from a guy who 10 seconds beforehand did not have a clue how to operate the vehicle. I have owned a TVR Tuscan for 3 years and its not the sort of car you can just jump into and drive flawlessly at high speed through tight city streets with no previous experience of driving a right hand drive car, let alone a manual one with the gearstick on the 'wrong side'.
Correction: This is a somewhat subjective mistake. While certain cars and vehicles might be more difficult than others to learn and operate, its not beyond the realm of impossibility. Its a bit like saying a character in a film shouldn't be able to operate a crane, or a speedboat when they seemingly have never used one before.
Corrected entry: When Stan is still at his trailer, and first calls his daughter's house, his ex-wife says that it's Saturday, and she is at soccer practice. After this point in the movie, Stan goes to LA, to Gabriel's house, and spends the night there (all in one day). The next morning he takes Ginger's car to see his daughter, who is at school. On a Sunday?
Correction: It's pretty apparent that his ex-wife is pretty medicated, probably outside the realm of what she actually needs. This, combined with the visible alcohol use, wouldn't make it out of the realm of possibility that the ex-wife was mistaken on what day it was, or where the daughter actually was. As we see, she is not the best parent.
Correction: It's also worth noting that the daughter *was* at school, indicating a school day, so therefore we can deduce, as the correction states, that the ex-wife was indeed so out of it she didn't know what day of the week it was.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Holly is waiting for her mother to pick her up, she uses her cell phone and makes a call by only entering 4 numbers. If you listen, and compare with your own phone, Holly dials 1234 in that order. (00:39:25)
Correction: Actually, the tones I heard indicate that she was using either the "speed-dial" function or the "recently called" list, both of which only require 3 or 4 presses starting at the main menu. This makes since, as her Mom would likely be in her "important" numbers on her phone, or on the list of people she has talked to recently.
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the chase scene when the Travolta's car runs through the intersection two cars almost hit his car. If you look closely by the Lincoln coupe you can see the skidmarks from previous takes. (00:59:10)
Correction: This kind of 'mistake' has been posted on numerous films and corrected. The road is used by all sorts of vehicles at all times of the day and night, any one of which could have left the skid marks. Even if it was from a previous takes, skid marks on a road are not a film mistake.
Corrected entry: When J.T. Roberts and friend come to see the two tech geeks he says 'Gentlemen,If it's not good news...' Right after 'news' look in the glass behind them.You can see the large white reflective screen and two or three of the crew's heads (to the right of the screen) in the reflection. (00:31:15)
Correction: There are other people in the office, it is not necessarily crew for the movie. I also saw two reflections in the mirror, which are most likely the reflections of J.T. Roberts and his friend walking into the room.
Corrected entry: Towards the end, right after Travolta shoots Halle Berry in the bank, Travolta's guys start moving the hostages. Look at the hostages' faces. Not one of them looks scared or worried or anything. They have just seen Travolta "kill" Halle Berry, have seen the blonde woman get blown up, and have 20lbs of C4 strapped to their bodies and are surrounded by men with guns, and yet not even the women are crying or scared or anything.
Correction: After the scene they just witnessed, it's possible that the hostages are in shock that they can't express any facial emotion.
Corrected entry: There is a logical discrepancy between the scene in which Jackman's character hacks into the Department of Defense and the scene in which Jackman begins to hack into the government's computers. Jackman successfully hacked into the government's network in the first scene. There should be no need for him to hack into it again.
Correction: It's not like the US government has one big network and access to one of them would give you access to all the others. Also security measures, passwords, etc. may or probably would have changed (after all when he got in such a short time he probably didn't cover his traces and all.).
Corrected entry: When the hostage and bad guy fall from the bus and blow up, it would seem that those ballbearings would create some havoc on the street down below, but Don and his boys drive right along.
Correction: If you look at the vests, the ball bearings are laying on top of the C-4, with the arrangement in a vertical facing, meaning the C-4 is pointing outwards with the ball bearings on top. The explosion would have sent those ball bearings flying out horizontally, not downwards, so nobody directly below will have been affected by the blast. Secondly, due to the range of the explosion, the ball bearings would have scattered far too wide to cause any widespread damage upon the street.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Halle Berry is being hanged, after Hugh Jackman gets the money to Monte Carlo, John Travolta says "bring her down" and we see a close up of Halle Berry. The thing is that she's suspended but there's a guy right next to her. They re-used the previous shot because it's the same guy that puts the rope on her neck.
Correction: I fail to see where there's a mistake there. The man to her right is there the entire time she's hanging from the ceiling. He's next to her holding her right leg around the calf. The shot of her coming down, however, is not a reversal of the first where she is going up as she's now leaning over coughing and gagging.
Corrected entry: Jobson's Worm Generator Tool has misspelled algorithm in two places, as "Assembling Crypto Algorhythm" and "Crypto Algorhythm." To the left of the useless graphic, "Create Rogue User Accouts" is also missing an "n." (00:55:50)
Correction: While definitely spelling errors, a lot of these "hacker" tools are written by people whose first language is not English and who are more interested in creating havoc than poetry so this is actually pretty realistic. It's not uncommon to download freeware with exactly these kind of spelling mistakes.
Corrected entry: I'd like to meet one... just one programmer... someday... who can work complex algorithms like that one out in their head... just by staring off to the side in feign deep concentration, looking like they're having a petite mal seizure. I know some programming geniuses, and they are not that good.
Correction: Well, it is a film, it's not meant to be totally realistic. And anyway, Stantly is supposed to be the best hacker in the world. Get some imagination.
Corrected entry: Where does John Travolta acquire a corpse that looks just like him AND has matching dental records without resorting to altering an existing corpse (by plastic surgery) so flawlessly that it wouldn't be detected by an autopsy to fool the authorities into thinking he died in the helicopter crash?
Correction: You're assuming that the dental records were actually his - it seems more likely that Shear simply substituted medical information for the dead man in place of his own. As far as finding a similar corpse, it seems reasonable that a concentrated search would turn up a lookalike - any subtle differences in appearance would be erased by the damage done in the helicopter crash.
Corrected entry: One of the most important issues of the movie was how the JT character was going to escape. He craftily leaves the rocket launcher where Stan can get it and he rightly assumes he will blow him up. Great, except that Stan was definitely to have left after the robbery. JT lets him out the door and only pulls him back in when the computer re-routes the money. The hostages on the bus are tied up so, WHO was to have shot down the helicopter with Stan not there?
Correction: The helicopter was obviously unmanned. Had Stan not shot it down, it would have crashed not too long after takeoff anyway, thus providing the Gabriel corpse the authorities needed.
Corrected entry: In the beginning and near the end of the film the girl explodes with all those ball bearings flying out at the speed of sound and they smash all the glass that they come into contact with, including the windows of the bank. However, after the girl explodes and all the windows are broken John T. and the rest of the bad guys take the remaining hostages out of the bank through the unbroken glass doors.
Correction: This is because of where they were at the time of the explosion., also the doors are sort of behind some of the buildings main supports, therefore preventing and ball-bearings reaching the doors.
Corrected entry: During the scene where Travolta and Jackman are attacked by the DEA teams in the SUV's, the bad guys (DEA) fire rounds through the windshield of Travolta's fancy sports car, as well as into the trunk lid, which is up as Travolta assembles and loads his machine-gun. Yet when the camera cuts back to the car in subsequent shots, the windshield is clean of bullet holes and the trunk lid is completely undamaged.
Correction: Not True. The holes are always there; they're not always easy to see, but they're always there.
Corrected entry: In the scene during the bank robbery John Travolta is clean shaven. In the next scene where they are leaving the bank in the bus John Travolta has a small beard again. The two scenes take place only a few minutes apart. (01:10:15 - 01:16:00)
Correction: This is no the case, it looks like he's clean-shaven because of camera angles and lighting, but he has the semi-goatee/beard/whatever the whole time.
Corrected entry: Throughout the scene just after the cliff fall of Stanley and Detectives they are by a black car, you can see the crew's tents and accessories in the reflection above the back left wheel. Also near the end of the scene where J.T. Roberts moves you can see the boom mics reflection.
Correction: This is wrong, as you cannot see the tents and other equipment of the crew, but the tents and equipment of the fisherman along the river.
Corrected entry: Even with flying cars, Swordfish's bad physics spread to the bearings. They appear to be about an inch in diameter which would give them a volume of 0.524 cubic inches per bearing. Using 0.284 lbs per cubic inch as the density of steel gives a weight of 0.149 lbs per ball bearing. This would mean each hostage was adorned with about 134 bearings. When a hostage blew up we can assume that the bearings would be projected outward in a uniform hemispherical pattern. At a distance of 50 yards, the hemisphere would have an area of 141,372 square feet. If the bearings were uniformly distributed, one bearing would strike in the middle of each 1055 square feet of area. In other words, about one bearing would hit a 32 × 32 foot wall in the path of the explosion. This would hardly be enough to turn it into a sieve. Even at 10 yards there would be less than a 30% chance of hitting a standing adult male with a single bearing. Bad maths!
Correction: The calculations are correct but the basic assumption - that the ball bearings would transit in a hemispherical pattern is incorrect. In order to do this the ball bearings would have to form a spherical mass, and they don't - they are arranged in a small cylinder and will transit outwards in a virtually horizontal trajectory. A cylinder 50 metres in radius will have a far smaller surface area - allowing for some leeway, essentially it will be 100 metres (the diameter of the cylinder) x 2 metres (the height of the cylinder) x pi (3.1416) = 628 square metres. That's roughly 2,100 square feet, and your chances of being hit by a ball bearing are now about 90%. I wouldn't bet my life on those odds.
Corrected entry: In a chase scene with Hugh Jackman and Don Cheadle, they catch up with him and slam him up against a black car. When he is slammed into the car, it dents and it gets dusty from the dirt on him. The camera cuts to Don who speaks to Hugh, then when they cut back to Hugh, the car behind him is undented and cleaned. Funny how repairs can happen within seconds.
Correction: Sorry incorrect. The dent is there the whole time, it is even in the same place.
Correction: The bus wasn't being chased by the police. They were escorting the bus to the airport which is what Gabriel's demand was. He then pulled a fast one on them by attaching the bus to a helicopter. Since the bus was only attached to the helicopter for a few minutes, we can safely assume that no police helicopters had time to intercept it - and how would a police helicopter stop anything like that anyway? The police aren't going to just shoot the helicopter down and risk killing all the hostages and others in an ensuing crash.
S. Ha