Broken Arrow (1996) - 43 mistakes

Other: When Christian Slater shoots 9 or 10 shots out of a 6-shooter, there is no possible way that he could have had time to reload in the time allotted.

Continuity: In the gun fight in the mine shaft, Christian Slater pulls the hammer down on his pistol, then seconds later it's back up.

Continuity: In the scene in the copper mine, Christian Slater accidentally arms the bomb. As it counts down it is at 26 minutes. Later it counts down to 22 minutes. When John Travolta finds the bomb and begins stroking it the timer is back to 26 minutes.

Continuity: In the big fight scene in the end John Travolta gets hit in the face and has blood all over his face and the front of his shirt.  This keeps disappearing.

Continuity: When Christian Slater and the ranger are radioing for help in the ranger's truck, the enemy helicopter comes from behind a ridge and shoots at them. They get out of the way, and the bullet fire continues and hits the truck on the driver side door, the roof above, and then the ground after that. In the next scene, you can clearly see bullet holes on the hood, going from front to back, but the fire was from right to left.

Continuity: When Slater and the ranger are getting into the boat there is a mysterious pair of binoculars that keeps appearing and disappearing.

Other: When Terry stands in the valley and the stealth passes above her, you can clearly see that a part of the B2 disappears behind a mountain that is several kilometers away before it has flown just a hundred metres away from Terry.

Continuity: Near the end of the movie, the underground nuclear bomb is detonated, creating shock waves and rippling in the ground beneath the Hummer getaway vehicle. The ripples are huge and come in waves, yet when the explosion subsides, and they drive away, the dirt road isn't rippled or disturbed at all.

Continuity: After the nuclear bomb is detonated, the helicopter spins out of control and crashes in front of the Hummer. Moments later, a camera shot from behind the Hummer shows the road in front of it to be clear, and the Hummer drives away without the helicopter being anywhere in sight.

Continuity: When Slater has captured the Hummer, Travolta slams into Slater's car which wrecks the right front light. Seconds later when Travolta arrives at the mine the front light is in one piece.

Continuity: When Hale and Terry get into the Zodiac on the river, in some of the shots there is a pair of binoculars on the seat, in some there isn't.

Continuity: In the closing fight sequence between Slater and Travolta, Travolta takes out a $20 bill, folded, and sets it under the remote for the nuke. Later, when they show the remote again, the bill is shown unfolded, in fact it is flat. When Christian picks the scorched bill off of the plant it is still flat.

Continuity: When Kelly fires at the hummer, you see that he punctures the gas tank. On hummers, the gas tank is in the middle of the underside. What he shot was the floorboard.

Continuity: When Terry and Hale first meet, Terry says "You're under arrest until we can get this sorted out", and puts the handcuffs on his right wrist. When he kicks her off, the handcuffs are on his left wrist.

Continuity: When Hale throws the gas bomb at Deakins' hummer, you notice that the damage to the right side of the front end from Kelly ramming the other hummer is magically gone.

Continuity: Toward the end of the movie, after the nuke has been armed in the mine and both groups are driving Hummers, John Travolta switches off the engine and informs his passengers that when the nuke goes off, the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) will disable any vehicle that is running. Little does John (and apparently the movie's director) know, but EMP will fry any and all electrical circuits, whether or not the vehicle is running.

Plot hole: Slater decides to render the nuke inert by punching in the wrong code three times. However, when he does this, the nuke becomes armed, and Travolta reveals that he is one step ahead by having used a special kind of circuit board to produce this result. Two questions: One, once Slater has armed one nuke, why not arm them all? You've got nothing to lose, and you can keep Travolta from getting them for whatever evil purpose he has in mind. Slater plans to send them all to the bottom of the copper mine anyway, so just arm them all. Two, Travolta later arms a nuke himself, and then smashes the keypad with his gun. Well, if you can do that, why doesn't Slater just smash all the keypads as soon as he gets the nukes? Travolta would be defeated; movie over.

Continuity: Towards the end of the movie, there is a nuclear bomb with a counter displaying  a digital readout of the time countdown.  After using several different camera shots and angles, the timer displays "26:00" then 18:00" then "23:00".

Factual error: When Christian Slater shoots down the Huey Helicopter, before it hits the ground the sound of the rotors/turbine changes to an Aerospatiale SA341 Gazelle helicopter. Much like the Chinook, the Gazelle has a VERY distinctive rotor/turbine sound.

Continuity: When we see Terry again after her escapee in the river with Hale, her hair and clothes are in perfect shape. Did she have a comb and hairspray on her?

Factual error: When Travolta is deep down in the mine shaft, he uses a two-way radio to talk to his guys upstairs. I know from personal experience, and from being in the military that two-way radios, no matter how much power output they put out, cannot talk for more than 100 feet max in an enclosed area such a mine with thick walls, let alone 2,000 ft (the distance the elevator travels in the mine).

Factual error: EMP is mentioned as a threat, but only atmospheric blasts generate EMP fields that affect large areas, not subterranean detonations.

Continuity: When Hall (Slater) and Terry (Mathis) fight on first meeting, he cleverly yanks her gun out of her holster as she kicks him away. However in the next shot she draws the gun out of the holster.

Factual error: During the scene on the train when Hale arrives in the helicopter, Deakin and Kelly shelter themselves from the incoming fire by hiding behind the walls, and manage to avoid taking any hits. This is odd considering they're sheltering not only behind wood walls, but wooden slats. The M16 with its 5.56mm rounds would easily penetrate the wood, let alone pass through the gaps, and injure, if not kill, our lovely villains. Even if they magically escaped unharmed, there would be bullet holes visible inside the train carriage, but these do not exist when the camera pans through it. Indeed, later on the train, Kelly fires a shotgun which happily penetrates the sides of the carriage. There is no reason an M16 would not be able to.

Factual error: Slater's character pulls the pin out of the grenade and throws the spoon. The grenade explodes after 8-10 seconds but in real life that grenade is fused for 3-4 seconds.

Factual error: The United States Air Force does NOT, ever, allow its pilots to box competitively! Ground staff, yes, pilots, no, never. A pilot can be suspended from flying if they receive a blow to the head in day to day life - boxing is right out. Almost all air forces (the RAF included) impose this rule.

Factual error: During the shootout on the roof of the train, the antenna is blown to bits. The antenna should be made from fiberglass, but is made from wood...

Continuity: When the helicopter on the train blows up, the boxes that Deakins is hiding behind are on fire. When Deakins stands up, the boxes are not even touched.

Continuity: When Slater and Travolta are flying the stealth bomber, the two nuclear weapons are shown in adjacent racks in the bomb bay. On the computer display in the cockpit, the weapons are shown with an empty rack in between them.

Continuity: During the fight on the train, the white antenna is shot to pieces (one of the corners is totally gone) but in the next clip it is less damaged.

Factual error: When Kelly falls from the train he falls straight down - compared to the bridge pillars. But since he falls out of a moving train, he would have had some forward speed too.

Continuity: When Deke hits the investor in the throat with a pipe, his head is straight back against the chair. In the next shot, his head is leaning to the left towards Deke and in the next shot it is straight again.

Plot hole: In the mine shaft, with the lift going the speed it does, it would take over 10 minutes to travel 2000 feet. Yet our characters manage to do it in about two minutes (use the bomb timer for reference). With the bomb timer starting at 30 minutes (not to mention Travolta puts it down to 13 in a later shot), everyone in the mine should be dead before they could escape.

Factual error: Despite what movies keep telling us, you cannot manually arm a nuke taken from a missile or bomb. A device called an accelerometer measures the speed of the flying/falling weapon and arms the warhead. It cannot be done on the ground. The warheads are specifically designed to make stealing a warhead and arming it by itself impossible. Deakins is a pilot, not a nuclear technician. He would need to disassemble the nuke and rebuild it completely to make it detonate. These features are designed so that bypassing/disassembling them DISABLES the nuke completely, making it completely unusable for just this reason.

Continuity: When Wilkins' helicopter blows up, the train comes to an almost complete stop and then goes through the tunnel slowly. When Hale and Terry are done sabotaging Deakins helicopter, the train is back to full speed.

Continuity: Despite a nuclear explosion sufficient to cause the ground to ripple for several kilometers, strangely, it is not sufficient to blow the top of the mineshaft.

Continuity: When Deakins drops the nuclear weapons out of the stealth, the parachutes on the nukes are white. When the recovery team finds the nukes, the parachutes are black.

Continuity: In the fight on the train scene, the train goes at very different speeds in the various shots.

Factual error: Hale uses coaxial cable from the antenna to swing down into the boxcar. A single length of coaxial cable would not hold Hale's weight, much less his own and the dead body he used for a counterweight.

Factual error: When Terry takes out the Navy Seal with a hammer, she throws it and it spins in the air, like a tomahawk. The tomahawk does this because it is carefully balanced, unlike a hammer, which has a heavy weight at one end (the head) the hammer would have flown straight.

Other: What the hell are uncoded circuit boards?

Revealing: In the last fight scene with John and Christian, Christian jumps out of the train and disarms the nuke with the remote and the nuke goes through John Travolta, but in slow motion you can clearly see a cheap dummy with white shoes on when he gets hit and flies out.

Continuity: When Christian Slater and the girl are trying to take over the jeep with the nukes in it, Slater shoots the driver's foot and pushes him out of the jeep to the side of the road, but then the car with Travolta in it accidentally runs over the guy in the middle of the road.