Swordfish (2001) - 42 mistakes

Other: 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.

Factual error: Worms are not created in AutoCAD.  Ever.  Period.  Does not happen, cannot happen.  Building design work and the like is done in AutoCAD.  Viruses and worms are coded out by hand or created with a generator by slackers that don't know the code and then compiled into executables.

Factual error: Considering the explosion's force vector, I am at a loss to explain the flying cars. The cars should have been pushed sideways. Inertia of the cars is another problem. Explosions occur in very short time intervals. So, the force needed to overcome a car's inertia and accelerate it into the air would be extremely large. Unfortunately, car bodies aren't designed for such forces. A violent explosion would hit a stationary car like a speeding bus. The car would be demolished, not thrown in the air. Bad physics!

Factual error: At the end of movie, the TV speaker says US Embassy in Istanbul was bombed by terrorists. US does not have an embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, but has a consulate. Embassies are located in the Capital, i.e. Ankara.

Continuity: Where Hugh Jackman drops his daughter off at her mother's home the headrest behind her is down. After she leaves, the cop jumps into the passenger seat and the headrest is up.

Continuity: When Hugh Jackman, Don Cheadle and the extra jump off the cliff and slide down the muddy, dusty side of the steep hill they are covered in filth on the way down. When they hit bottom the only evidence of the trip is a little sweat. Even their shoes are clean.

Continuity: In the car chase scene Gabriel goes to get the gun from the boot leaving his door open then he starts to fire the gun with the boot open later the view switches and both are closed.

Revealing: When the Senator is being killed by Travolta in the river, we can see some shots of his assistant before his car explodes. If you stop the motion just half a second before the frontal shot of the explosion, you can see in the driver seat a dummy with a green face.

Factual error: When the copter is getting ready to lift the bus, there is a shot where you can clearly see high-tension electrical wires and a tower behind the parade of vehicles. The wires path must have crossed the roadway the bus etc. were on just moments before. How then, did the copter remain cabled to the bus?

Continuity: When the Hummer charges into the bank, it drives into the office. In the view from the desk, a blond man leaps out the way. In the next shot, the Hummer is further away and the man leaps out the way again.

Continuity: Towards the end of the film, during the bus scenes, all the hostages have their hands tied tightly together with their inner wrists facing each other. When the cables snap and Vinnie Jones and the oriental looking gentleman slide out of the back window, the oriental man somehow manages to hold onto the rail on the back of the bus for a few seconds with his hands apart.

Factual error: When Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman leave the airport, the sign on the building says 'Republic of Texas', yet they are supposed to be in LA.

Continuity: When he lifts his head off the floor, Don Cheadle appears to have blood over his eye in the scene which was the repeat of the first hostage was blown up. But the next camera shot is Don getting up from the floor with no blood on his face.

Continuity: In the beginning of the film when Axl Torvalds is in immigration, the male immigration officer holds Torvalds' German passport and compares the picture in it with Torvalds. In the following shot the female immigration officer finds another passport, again a German one, in Torvalds' luggage. She then proceeds to hand it over to the male immigration officer who compares the passports. But at this point one of the German passports has somehow turned into a Finnish one.

Continuity: When the Senator is first called out of session he's talking to the other guy.The Senator asks 'When was this?' and looks to him. In the next shot he's facing more forward.

Factual error: Axel Torvalds and his lawyer are not speaking Finnish. It sounds more like German, which would make sense, seeing as Rudolf Martin, the actor playing Axel Torvalds, is German.

Continuity: Immediately following the terrorists departure from the bank by bus, Don Cheadle enters a police black and white, license plate 999045. When he reaches the building on which the helicopter deposits the bus he gets out of a police car whose registration is now 873041A.

Continuity: Throughout the chase scene several cars appear at least twice. The most noticeable are an Oldsmobile Sedan, A Lincoln coupe, and a mustang convertible.

Factual error: In the bank, when Halle Berry is about to be hanged, we see Hugh Jackman typing on a computer to get the money back. In one shot of the screen, we see a world map with some names countries and their capitals. On this map, Colombia is misspelled as Columbia; and the city of Bogota appears to be in the wrong place.

Visible crew/equipment: When they are about to attack the bank, there are Humvees that are travelling along the roads. When they beep someone off the middle of the road, as the second one goes by you can see the reflection of the camera in the side door.

Continuity: Just after Hugh drops off his daughter, a cop gets into the car. Hugh then reverses, hits Don's car damaging the passenger door and smashing the glass. Then they tumble down the cliff, but when Hugh slams into the car at the bottom of the cliff, the door and glass are intact.

Continuity: When Torvalds is alone with Roberts, there is a shot of Roberts saying "I shot a suspect in the hand" with his tie out of the coat. Two shots later when he says "Do you know how difficult?" his tie is inside the coat.

Continuity: When we first see the interview room with Axel Torvalds in, a detective is standing behind him and his lawyer. He then goes to lean on the desk with one hand remaining on his hip. In the next shot he's put both hands on the table.

Continuity: At the beginning Gabriel and Stan leave the coffee shop. The high up shot (with the helicopter flying past it) shows them walking out into the road, with Gabriel almost at the middle of the road before the shot changes. Then there's a shot of his face then in the next shot from behind a police car they are just leaving the pavement area.

Factual error: Early in the film they cut to a scene with the title Washington D. C. and you can see in a long shot the very distinctive building "The Bonaventure Hotel" which is in downtown Los Angeles. This building is one of a kind and there are no buildings like this in Washington DC. Also the buildings in the long shots of this scene are high rises. So even if you don't know the uniqueness of the hotel a lot of people do know that Washington DC does not have such tall buildings because of height restrictions.

Visible crew/equipment: After the '60 seconds test' Stan goes to the bathroom. After Ginger says 'I really wanna help you Stan' he moves to the towels. Watch the mirror to the far left of the screen and you'll see the boom mic to the top-right of the mirror just before the shot changes.

Factual error: As the hacker is typing, a close up of his fingers is seen. As he types his fingers seem to hit random and multiple keys. Any typing like this will result only in garbage, not the correctly spelled words that appear on his screen.

Visible crew/equipment: When Gabriel and Stan make the deal he's sitting at the computer and he swivels round to face the screens. When he's taking his jacket off look to the upper right part of the screen. The boom mic is just poking down far enough to be seen and wobbles continually.

Continuity: When Stanley is hitting golf balls from the top of his trailer, we see a close-up of his left hand placing the ball on the tee. In the next shot, he's still leaning down, but now it's his right hand which has been placing the ball.

Continuity: During one of the two explosion scenes you can clearly see the wire that is used to keep the bonnet (and boot) from flying off too far.

Continuity: When Travolta and Jackman are chased by the vans, there is a shot from Travolta standing in the car with a gun in his hands. A split second later there is a shot from the front, showing them sitting next to each other in the car. There's no way he could have gotten down so fast.

Other: When Stanley is driving the Tuscan TVR while trying to escape the assassins, each close-up of the dashboard readout reveals that the speedometer is actually at 0.

Continuity: During the scene in the nightclub where John Travolta first tells Hugh Jackman to hack entry in 60 seconds instead of 60 minutes, Vinne Jones is holding a gun to Hugh's head. As the shot switches back & forth during the scene, you see Vinnie is holding the gun two handed in 1 shot, & single handed in the other. This is repeated a few times as the shot changes.

Factual error: Some of the IP address listed during his cyber hack are not real IP address (ie. 293.*.*.*) The highest possible number is 255. This was done for the same reason that movies use 555- for phone numbers: to prevent enthusiastic moviegoers from actually reaching any real person or entity.

Continuity: When the car stops at the bottom of the hill that the three blokes have fallen down, its a dusty blue colour, camera pans away, returns, and it changes to a nicely polished dark car.

Continuity: When Stanley has to hack in the computer for the first time in one minute with the gun on his head, Gabriël says he has one minute. But it is much longer than just one minute.

Continuity: When the government agents try to take out John Travolta and Hugh Jackman, all of the SUV's are supposed to be Lincoln Navigators.  Travolta destroys the first two.  The third SUV turns left around a corner and it's a Ford Expedition, not a Lincoln Navigator.  The scene cuts away and when the SUV is closer it's a Lincoln Navigator.

Factual error: When John Travolta flies in a helicopter to kill the congressman who is fishing, the caption states that they are in Bend, Oregon, when actually they are in Redmond, Oregon.

Factual error: In the opening sequence of the movie, Travolta's speech invokes the Sidney Lumet film "Dog Day Afternoon", but says it was released in 1976. In reality, DDA came out in 1975.

Factual error: Jackman's character states that he will hack into the government's network using an old PDP-10. The command line interface for a PDP-10 should be shown on the monitors. None of the shots of the monitors in the movie show a PDP-10 command line.

Revealing: When Don Cheadle slams the lawyer against the wall of the interrogation room, the wall wobbles and shakes.

Factual error: In the beginning, when Halle Berry is going to get Hugh Jackman, there is a caption saying "Midland, Texas". Midland does not look like that! There are no hills, and hardly any green vegetation. That couldn't have been shot anywhere in West Texas, especially not Midland.