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The shopping mall used in this film is the same one that was used in Terminator 2. See more...
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Commando (1985) - 155 mistakes
Directed by Mark L. Lester, starring Alyssa Milano, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dan Hedaya, Rae Dawn Chong, Vernon Wells (add more)
Factual error: If the access hatch to the nose wheel well on an airliner was opened at any time during the flight, every alarm panel in the cockpit would light up like a Christmas tree. In this case happening within seconds of takeoff the pilot would immediately declare an emergency, turn around and land at the airport he had just left.
Continuity: At the very end of the film. When the 3 helicopters and the seaplane come into land, it is quite a wide show, with no boats visible. A few minutes later, when the seaplane takes off again, a big white boat is near the cost. Even if the boat was off camera during the landing scene, a few minutes was surely not enough to get that far, and that close to the shore.
Continuity: When Arnold lets go of the landing gear he lands in the water. A few seconds later we see him walking up towards the beach, and we can now see that he is only wet from his waist down. It's not likely that he would have been able to land standing on his feet and not not becoming completely soaked.
Revealing: When Arnold raids the compound at the end, he blows up several buildings. Watch carefully, there are dummies all around the building to look like people, but they are so poorly constructed and look so ridiculous it's absurd. There are three separate shots to check out, all within seconds of each other.
Audio problem: The scene where Bennet and Matrix are fighting towards the end of the movie, before Matrix kills Bennet they have each others throat in their hands and one of their backs is against the furnace. While they are grunting and groaning, if you listen carefully, you can hear one of them say "switch" just before they change positions.
Continuity: When Matrix is infiltrating the base (just before he blows everything up), and just after he has cut a soldier's throat and planted a bomb, he is confronted by two more soldiers walking along with rifles slung. Seeing Matrix, the two frantically start un-slinging their rifles. Matrix throws two knives at them. Next we see the two soldiers falling with knives in their throats... and the one on the right has his rifle fully slung again.
Continuity: In the fight scene where Matrix and Bennett are trying to force each other against the furnace, watch Bennett's hands as he struggles with Matix. In one shot Bennett has his hand pressing against Matrix's face, in the reverse shot he is holding Matix by the back of his head/hair. His hands switch back and forth several times.
Continuity: The style of Cindy's car changes when Matrix and Cindy are tailing Sully. Note the front grille with the center emblem that suddenly appears, the style of the headlight chambers that surround the headlight casings, as well as the two bumper guards that disappear and reappear. Obviously different vehicles.
Continuity: While on the compound, there is a scene where some army guys are driving at Matrix in a jeep. They drive past some random army supplies and are about to surprise Matrix when he turns around and nails them with his rocket launcher. Or he sort of nails them. Actually, the army supplies that they had just passed have suddenly relocated and are crashed into by their jeep. Rewind and play repeatedly for full humour effect.
Continuity: During the attack on El Presidentes house Matrix is seen using the belt fed machine gun. One shot shows him firing it apparently left handed (the film has been flipped as mentioned before) with a strap diagonally across his chest. The shots immediately before and after this he does not have the strap. A couple of shots later he is seen picking up a gun with a strap and putting it over his head. The next shot is the same one as previous but flipped back to its correct way.
Continuity: During the ridiculously overdrawn action sequence at the end, Arnie has a belt-fed machine gun which becomes lefty and righty through certain shots. Since Arnie isn't lefty, and it's unlikely that the army would just have a lefty belt-fed gun lying around, it's safe to say that the picture was reversed.
Revealing: During the stunt where the police van flips over (as a result of the rocket launcher attack) you can see the telegraph pole section used to flip the van over. It rolls down the road. (Stunts involving flips rely on a mini pile driver under the vehicle, as opposed to using an explosive charge by itself which can be too unpredictable).
Deliberate "mistake": In the scene in which Matrix rams Sully off the road we see his car go up the embankment and land on its side. It lands about three feet from the embankment.Then when we see Matrix go to flip the car back onto its wheels, it is now about seven or eight feet from the embankment.
Revealing: At the end of the fight between Matrix and Bennett, Matrix throws a pipe through his body into the steam duct behind him. However, immediately after he is pierced by the pipe, we see Bennett slide about half a foot down the wall, which would be impossible with the pipe lodged in behind him.
Continuity: The rocket launcher. It has 4 barrels. Which means 4 shots. Cindy uses 2 rockets to save Arnie from the police truck. When he is using the rocket launcher when he is saving his daughter, he fires 2 rockets. 1 at the jeep behind him and 1 at the large impassable door. But when you see him fire these 2 rockets, they both come out of the same top right barrel. Why would he need 4 barrels if the rockets come out of a single barrel?
Continuity: Halfway through the movie, Matrix is checking out the house where they keep his daughter. We then see a shot that shows what he is seeing through his binoculars, as he looks from the left to the right. Strangely, the landscape seems to move in the same direction as he is moving the binoculars, whereas normally the landscape would be moving in the opposite direction.
Continuity: When Matrix and Cindy follow Sully from the airport to the shopping mall the front license plate of Cindy's car is missing. When they arrive inside the mall parking ground it is back again. Later, when they follow Sully from the mall to the point where they intercept him, the plate is gone again.
Factual error: The explosives that Matrix places by the buildings on the island are Anti-personnel Claymore mines. You can see on the back, it says "APERS MINE" (APERS MINE = Anti-Personnel Mine). They spray out steel balls designed to take out enemy troops. The relatively small amount of explosive in them is used to propel the steel balls to lethal speeds. There's nowhere near enough explosive in them to demolish those buildings the way that was shown in the movie. In regards to the point about explosives being inside the buildings and being "ignited by the blast of the mines". There's no way Matrix could have known about the explosives inside the buildings. He was OUTSIDE the buildings, so he would have no logical reason to place the explosives there. Also, some of those buildings were barracks for the troops. There would not be explosives stored in them.
Continuity: As the two garbage men are shooting the guy at the start of the movie, we see from the side shot that they are standing parallel to each other a few feet apart and they stay still as they shoot him. Then when the camera changes angles to the front shot after the dead guy falls, we see the bad guy on the right has moved a few feet forward.
Factual error: As noted elsewhere, it is simply not credible that Cindy, a trainee pilot, could land an seaplane so neatly, but it should also be pointed out that she banks into a low level formation on three helicopters - a very tricky manouevre, and then immediately after take off banks tightly into a high speed flyover of the squad on the beach. Both of these stunts would demand a very high level of skill from a pilot, especially one flying a lumbering old seaplane.
Continuity: At the beginning of the movie when Matrix is driving his truck down the mountains after the bad-guys, there are two mistakes. The first is that just before Matrix's truck crashes, the two cars he's chasing (the car and the van) are very close to one another, and Matrix drives right between the two cars without hitting either of them. This is because after you see the shot of the two vehicles close to one another, the next shot you see the van that was following the car is way behind and totally misses Matrix's truck. The next mistake is just before Matrix's truck falls off the little cliff, you see many trees in front of him (where the cliff was supposed to be), however, once the truck actually falls off, the cliff is there with no trees around it.
Revealing: The scene with the shack has many mistakes, but only if you play it in slow-mo. First, he throws the circular saw at the guy in the window, the saw is moving on wires and he has a hairpiece someone just pulls off with a wire. The next guy he stabs with a pitchfork, and Arnie just lightly stabs him and the guy falls forward holding onto the pitchfork to make it look as though he was stabbed. Arnie then throws a saw at a guy hitting him in the chest. The guy actually just catches the saw in his arms in a way to make you think he got hit. Then Arnie swings some sort of gardening tool into the genitles of a man, but he actually stops it before it hits the guy and the thug just holds onto the handle. Finally, Arnie hacks off the forearm of a another man. You can tell that his arm was fake from the elbow on.
Audio problem: When Arnie sets his stop watch to count down from 11hrs, each second that the watch ticks over there is a loud 'beep'. This is consistent with when he looks at his watch later in the mall, when it reads 9hrs 40mins to go, his watch is still beeping every second. Therefore, Arnie's watch should have been beeping every second of the movie in between these two scenes, but we never hear it. Also, when Arnie and Cindy arrive at the Sunspot Motel (7hrs 57min to go) and when Arnie's in the back of the police wagon, at 5hrs 2min to go, the watch no longer beeps with each passing second.
Factual error: Right after John Matrix kills Henriques and tells the flight attendant, "don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" he gets up to go to the restroom. The Flight attendant tells him, "sir you must remain seated during takeoff", Matrix replies, "I'm airsick". This would not work because the flight attendant would point out that there are barf bags at each seat.
Continuity: During the fight at the end of the movie between Matrix and Bennett when Bennett calls Matrix a "dead man" and he responds with "Bullshit" you see him come off the wall with his left hand. He is throwing a left hook, but in the very next shot when the punch comes in contact with Bennett his fist is going from right to left in a backfist motion, rather than a left to right hook.
Continuity: Right when the fight between Matrix and Bennett begins, the Uzi submachine gun vanishes from Bennett's right shoulder (it was on a strap). Then suddenly at the end of the fight (after the fell down over the railing and to the next level down, the Uzi reappears when Bennett picks it up and attempts to shoot Matrix. Bennett lost it on the upper level nowhere near the railing, and it somehow appeared on the lower level away from the railing.
Factual error: Rae Dawn Chong sees a receipt for some aircraft fuel and comments that its "type 4" the kind used for amphibian aircraft. Well I've not heard of "type 4" and surely fuel used is differentiated by the type of engine not by the type of aircraft, JP4 is kerosene for jet engines and avgas for piston engines. (The plane they take has piston engines).
Plot hole: When General Kirby goes to John Matrix's house to tell him his men have been killed, he names, "Lawson, Forrestal, Bennett, they've all been hit". Later, Arius reveals to Matrix, "we had to fake Bennett's death so General Kirby would become agitated and lead us to you". Why would Bennett be the only one out of the three who's death would cause Kirby to go to Matrix's home?
Continuity: During the machine gun scene at the en Matrix has a belt fed M60 machine gun. When the fight starts, he has plenty of bullets. A few seconds later he has about 20 cm length of the bullet belt left. Scene switch - and he has more bullets. This switch between low and high ammo a few times.
Plot hole: In the beginning of the movie, the other members of the Matrix special forces team are killed in various ways. None of them saw the threat coming, none of them decided to try and fight, the man with the trash even seemed scared when he saw the guns instead of reacting in some way. We are led to believe that Matrix is the only operative in his unit to have never lost his edge.
Factual error: Matrix reads coordinates N33° 13' W117° (or possibly W119°) 18'. Neither LAT or LONG has seconds; just degrees and minutes, but he says, "These coordinates are somewhere near Santa Barbara". Even if you fill in 59" for the latitude north, it's still quite a ways south of Santa Barbara. If you fill in 119° it takes you farther west out to sea: that much further from Santa Barbara. The closest island to those coordinates is San Nicolas Island, and since they did go to an island later, that must have been it. Still a far cry from Santa Barbara. The handwritten coordinates would be much easier to read on Blu Ray.
Continuity: When Matrix boards the plane towards the beginning of the film, it is early evening - the sun is shown to be low in the sky, casting long shadows. Once he has escaped from the plane and is making his way back across the runways into the airport building, the shadows are smaller and more intense, showing the sun is more directly overhead - therefore it has suddenly become much earlier in the day.
Continuity: In the mall, before the girl enters the bar, a guy in a blue and white shirt is half a metre away from passing next to her. Camera shot on Arnold, then back to the girl, and now the walker, plus the passers by around, have stepped backwards several metres and repeat their movements again.
Factual error: When Cindy first gets into the seaplane, she asks 'where are the LCD readouts? - I learned in a Cessna' as well as saying 'this plane is older than I am.' Any Cessna she learned to fly in would almost certainly be older than her, but even worse, Cessnas used for initial flight training (150s, 152s or 172s) certainly do not have LCD displays.
Continuity: During the long shoot-out at the compound, Arnold shoots down a whole army of bad guys. When he reaches the fountain, he shoots at about 3 or 4 people from a bird's eye view. If you watch closely, you can see one of the guards dive on the ground and play dead before Arnold's stream of bullets reaches him. Given what was happening at the time, that may have not been a bad idea.
Deliberate "mistake": At the mall when Sully first sees Matrix, he grabs at Cindy's handbag wanting a quarter. It's amazing that Cindy first would have a quarter just laying around in there, but it's also amazing how quick he finds it without looking! What if he got to the phone and it was a nickel? He never even looks at it!
Continuity: At the end, where Matrix kills Bennett by throwing a pipe through him (OK sure, but let's just pretend). The pipe goes through Bennett, and into a steam pipe behind him. Then steam pours out of the Pipe that Matrix threw. Now what happened to all of the flesh, bone, skin, and blood that was inside of the pipe?







