Vertical Limit (2000) - 49 mistakes

Revealing: When Wick is rubbing his toeless feet, the shot changes so that the camera is behind him and you can see him still rubbing except now you can see that he is simply curling his toes over.

Factual error: Nitroglycerin does not react with sunlight, nor does it boil in sunlight.

Continuity: Peter walks into a tent where Monique tells him where to find Skip. The stubble he has when talking to Monique is totally gone when he finds Skip, immediately afterward.

Continuity: Monique has the arm of her jacket cut by a helicopter blade, yet this is not visible throughout the rest of the movie.

Factual error: When the expedition is unloading from the helicopter, it shows a view of the lady with the helicopter blades about to cut her head off. It then shows a view of the helicopter, perfectly upright, and people are still jumping off! She then gets up and crawls to the rock wall, which in a full view you can see that it is at least 15 feet away from the edge. The helicopter blades follow her, perfectly parallel with the ground. It is physically impossible - the helicopter would have to be underground for this to happen.

Continuity: When the first climb the "K2" mountain Annie is breathing perfectly without opening her mouth, while the others are gasping for air. She notices she's not breathing hard and all of a sudden her mouth opens wide and she starts gasping too.

Revealing: Those are the most haphazardly secured cases of nitro I've ever seen in a movie. Couldn't they spare a shoelace or duct tape to secure the top?

Continuity: When the rescue team are jumping from the helicopter to the side of the mountain, the chopper suddenly swings causing Monique to dive for cover. When she dives to the floor there is nothing around her only snow and ice, yet in the following shot when the propeller blades are close to her, a large rock has appeared to her right which wasn't there in the previous shot.

Continuity: When Vaughn and Annie come up with the idea of some kind of signal to let Peter know where they are, Vaughn grabs the bag on the snow next to him with his left hand, but in the following shot the bag is in his right hand.

Continuity: When Vaughn, Annie and Tom have fallen down inside the mountain, the camera cuts to Skip trying to call them on the radio. When the camera cuts to some people behind him, a big man is leaning towards another man sitting with a headset on. In the following shot facing Skip, that man is now standing up in the background .

Continuity: At the beginning, when Peter Garrett is singing the song, he ends on a high note and stretches his arm out, but his body remains on the wall. In the next shot he has everything stretched out with his body away from the wall.

Continuity: When Chris O'Donnell blows a hole over the ice cave, his sister is directly below the hole, even though she was shown running into a side cave for protection.

Continuity: When Wick finds his wife on the mountain and Peter Garrett says, "Is this what your looking for," Peter's hand on the Dex case changes somewhat between shots from being held at the side to being held at the bottom.

Continuity: When we see Peter in the hut taking photographs, in the previous shot from a small distance from beyond the two tigers, there is only one large rock then one behind that one. When the shot goes to Peter's camera there is now two small rocks in line with each other.

Continuity: In the first several shots of Wick's frozen wife, her jacket hood sits partway down her forehead. When Wick approaches her, the hood has moved up higher on her head, so you can see her entire forehead and some of her hair.

Visible crew/equipment: Just after Vaughn and the others have started there climb up K2, Annie is pulling herself across a rope from one mountain to another. In the reflection of Vaughn's goggles, in his close up, the large white panel and what looks like a camera are visible.

Continuity: When Peter and the black pilot are in the helicopter, and are just about to land, when the shot faces the big guns the helicopter starts off above the guns, when the shot changes the helicopter is below the guns, and then back above the guns.

Continuity: At the very beginning of the film, when the amateurs fall, one of the amateurs swings past Royce Garrett. In the next shot when the ropes comes away from the wall, the two amateurs are a lot higher up, and when the amateurs' rope falls, if you slow this shot down it misses Royce Garrett, yet in the following shot he gets snagged off the wall by the rope.

Revealing: Near the beginning when the bearded guy falls and clamps his leg between two rocks they shake.

Continuity: After his death, McLaren's body keeps changing position and his eyes appear open and closed during the scenes.

Visible crew/equipment: After the father tells Chris O'Donnell to cut the rope, and there is a zoom shot of a nervous O'Donnell, the camera cuts to where the father will fall. If you look at the top of the screen, you can see part of the father's harness dangling.

Continuity: When the guys are unloading from the chopper, you can see the pilot is going through hell to keep it stable. And he obviously can't. There's a master alarm flashing all over and the pilot even says something like "get out, we're gonna fall". However, the girl is almost getting shattered by the chopper blades, which keep going round above her head as if the helicopter was really stable.

Factual error: When Annie wants to use the Dexamethasone (glucocorticoid class of hormones produced by the adrenal glands), she takes the box out from her backpack. Climbers normally keeps it warm and close to their body.

Continuity: When Annie, Elliott and Tom are inside the cave on the mountain, Vaughn spots a red pack with hardly any snow on it on the other side of the cave, yet in the following shot of the pack, its color can't be seen because it's suddenly covered with a lot of snow and ice.

Continuity: When we first see Peter, Annie and the dad are on the rockface, which is very flat in the close-ups, but in all distance shots of the rockface it has changed substantially from being flat to being incredibly rocky in many places.

Continuity: When Peter, Skip and the others walk out of the hut where the Pakistanis kept the nitro, Skip walks out and sits down, and he is looking at Peter when Peter walks away. In the following shot he is looking straight ahead of him, not in Peter's direction.

Continuity: When Peter, Annie and their dad are on the wall, Peter makes his jump up to the next grip, and as the camera pans out the rope goes straight to the dad. In the next shot there is a carabineer in the wall holding the rope just above Peter, then the rope carries onto the dad.

Continuity: When Peter, Wick and the others transfer from the helicopter to the mountain, in the first shot of the mountain there are countless boulders and rocks where they get off, yet in all other shots, the rocks and boulders have gone.

Continuity: When Peter is inside the little hut in the mountains of Pakistan, there is a man inside the hut with him. His position behind Peter changes from being to the right of Peter to standing behind him between shots.

Continuity: When we first see Cyril and Monique, the first shots of Monique, she is not that far away from Cyril, yet in subsequent shots the distance has changed.

Continuity: When Cyril and Monique are hanging over the edge, Monique is holding onto her axe, yet in the following shot she isn't.

Visible crew/equipment: When Annie, Elliot and Tom McLaren stop and are talking half way up the mountain, if you look closely in Annie's goggles/shades, you can see crewmen holding a large white panel.

Factual error: When Chris O'Donnell is inside his tent talking on the radio with his trapped sister, they're talking like they're on the telephone, like if they can interrupt each other at will. On a radio, you can only hear the other guy after you've stopped talking. That conversation could never have taken place like that. Besides, they never press the "send" button.

Audio problem: When the three of them fall into that "cave" one of the men coughs without his mouth moving.

Continuity: When O'Donnell is about to jump from one side of a cliff to the other,the first shot shows the other side higher than the one Chris is. In all the other shots the other side is lower.

Continuity: Close to the beginning of the film, when Annie and Peter are talking in the tent before she goes up to climb, in one shot she says "of course I remember," and she turns her head and looks at him. In the following shot she is turning her head again as well as her body to face him.

Revealing: When the expedition is going to pick up the old guy, (I can't quite remember the name) and they are about to land in the snow, you can clearly see that there are already marks from a helicopter.

Continuity: After Wick has just discovered the body of his wife, when Peter says, "So did Vaughn use it for himself, answer me dammit," Wick is holding his backpack with both hands, but in the following shot he is holding the backpack with only his left hand.

Continuity: When Peter and Monique are sitting down, Peter takes her glove off, and he moves his hand down to her hand, yet in the following shot we see his hand by the sleeve of her coat again.

Factual error: When one of the crazy brothers and a Sudanese guy are climbing the mountain they come to a place where the muslim guy starts praying. The way he prays wrong. During a muslim prayer your hands are raised to your ears for a few seconds and lowered again, but the guy keeps his hands raised and prays. Plus you cannot talk while your praying or look away as the guy does to motion towards the nitro.

Continuity: When the helicopter is dropping off the crew at highest point, the girl is extending the rope to one of the team members. At this time the rope is taut and she is asking for more slack, and struggling hard. Later,they show another camera view and the rope is laying on the ground coiled. Not only did they show the mistake once but at least 2-3 times.

Continuity: When one of the guys falls of a cliff, I don't remember who, he stabs his hammer into the cliff. After a few seconds the hammer goes up a bit, even though he is hanging on it.

Continuity: The boiling nitroglycerin in the shed, on the floor, around the boot is bubbling in different places depending on the shot.

Revealing: In the opening shots of the film there is an eagle flying around the buttes. It is an obviously digitally rendered eagle as it is transparent at some points. This is very evident when the eagle passes from in front of a butte to the open sky and it's obviously not a shadow.

Factual error: I'm a skydiver and when we fly above 20.000 feet it is mandatory to have oxygen masks on. Our friend Billy FLIES IN at base camp @ 23.000 feet, stays there for only 2 days and races off for the summit. I don't see him acclimatize or wearing oxygen.....

Factual error: Throughout the movie they throw around their bags, shake them around and throw themselves onto them with the nitro strapped onto the bags. They should have got blown to pieces at least a dozen times. It's only when it's time to pour the nitro in the snow to blow a hole they are careful.

Continuity: Somehow, despite Mrs. Wick's corpse being encased in a block of ice (and her back, and presumably backpack is the deepest buried part of her), and only being uncovered for two minutes, Chris O'Donnell's character finds her empty medicine case, without Jonathan Wick noticing.

Factual error: When the photographers are hiding in the blind, shooting the bears, they have a table sitting behind them covered in extra gear. All the extra film that's sitting around is Kodak Max 400, a supermarket film, and nothing that a professional wildlife photographer would be using.

Continuity: When the rescue crew jumps off the helicopter you can see there's a big snow storm and the pilot says this is the highest point at which he can drop them off . But later on (just a few minutes later) the sun is shinning high and it looks nothing like it was.