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When they are going to kill the senator, the killer walks on one side of the dog, but when you look at the tape one of the guys has, the killer walks on the other side of the dog. See more...

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Seth Green, who plays one of the main surveillance guys in the van, is not listed in the opening or closing credits. See more...

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Enemy of the State (1998) - 22 corrections

Directed by Tony Scott, starring Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Lisa Bonet, Will Smith (add more)

Genres: Action, Drama, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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When the NSA people identify Brill and go through his file, they tell us that he graduated from Drexel University in 1964. Brill could not have graduated from Drexel University (DU) in 1964 because it was called Drexel Institute of Technology (DIT) at that time. It didn't change from DIT to DU until 1970. [My sister's college changed names three times in the four years she was there (Mount St. Claire University, The Franciscan Unifersity, Ashford University). When someone asks where she went to college she will say Mount St. Claire just as often as Ashford. Point is, this is a character choice of using the name he's more familiar with, not a movie mistake.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
How on earth can the computer guy tell that Mr. Dean's nanny doesn't shave her legs, given that in the one scene she has, she is wearing trousers. Odd. [This doesn't seem to be an error - the team have been conducting surveillance on the house, so would have had ample time to discover this fact.]
Edit
Towards the end of the film Will sees himself in his TV set. The image is taken from directly in front. Will should be smart enough to know that the image can't be taken from an elevated position like the fire alerter he is looking at. [The two cameras they have planted were in the fire alerters, so that was his first thought. Surprised by viewing himself in the TV, he might have not thought about it propperly or probably had a hard day and couldn't bother thinking about the exact location of the camera. This is a character mistake.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
At the end, Will sees a video of him on his TV screen indicating that Gene Hackman has a video camera in his home. The image on the TV screen is a mirror image however, not a video image. [Some cameras reproduce only mirrored images, like my webcam.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
When they enter the "jar" at the end of the movie, the cat in one cut is locked out of the fence and the next cut the cat is in the fence and running up the stairs. [The gate closes with the cat outside, that's correct. However when Brill is putting the stairs fully down we see a camerashot from behind the gate and it is moving and opening, check the space between the wire-mesh fence. So the cat has opened the gate, easy thing to do as she could just push against it because she was on the outside.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
When the politician is murdered, the murderer walks up behind him as he opens the front door of his car. But when the Daniel Zavitz examines the tape of it, the politician is opening the back door. [The murdered politician opens the back door in reality and on the video. Look at the frame of the door, it is rounded at the back, indicating that it is the back door. Then the murderer openes the front door to put the dead politician behind the wheel. Check the frame here as well, sharp corner on the back and rounded in front. Everything is correct.]
Edit Corrected by Ronnie Bischof
In the scene where Gene is talking to Jon there are clear skies and it's sunny. As soon as Gene starts running it's raining. [Gene has a plastic cover on his hat so rain is expected. But more importantly; it's a different scene when we see him running.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
Towards the end of the movie, Brill, in the van outside the restaurant, says "This guy's going down and he's gonna take all of you with him. Trust me on this." However, when we are at the FBI interview room, the recording of the same conversation is missing the line "Trust me on this." [The scene in the FBI interview room is not intended to be a duplicate of the earlier conversations, it is some highlights to show what happened so of course some parts are missing.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart Time
In the shoot up at the end of the film, the crooked politician (the guy who is chasing Will Smith, and who ordered the killing at the start) is punched in the face. If you watch it slowly, his glasses fall off twice within the second after he is punched. [Firstly he's not punched, he's pushed, and the use of slow motion for something minor invalidates this.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
When Zavitz is looking through the videotape from the lake, it is first black & white when there are just some birds. But when the killing on the other side of the lake is shown, the video suddenly turns to colour. [Zavitz is watching the video with two seperate windows on his computer. The NSA agents who raided his home said he had digital compression equipment so Zavitz could have set the "main" video in B&W and color in the window he zoomed in on.]
Edit Corrected by Mister Ed
When Gene Hackman is in the lift stripping bugs from Will Smith the surveillance van moves to get a better position. As it pulls out it clearly hits a parked car on its right side. When the van is next seen turning a corner to get the better position there is not even a scratch on the side of the vehicle. [The vehicle the van hits has plastic bumpers and may have just bounced off, plus, the shot of the van turning afterwards is too dark and too short for us to see any damage.]
Edit Corrected by Mister Ed
When the people at the NSA realize that Will Smith and Gene Hackman are at a convenience store, they look at a video taken from their satellite twenty minutes earlier. They obviously didn't program their satellite to watch the convenience store so how did it look at that area by itself? [Hackman tells Smith to stay put. Smith gets out and makes a call on the pay phone which the NSA then traces, finds their location and subsequently they obtain the footage of them in the convenience store.]
Edit
After Brill (Gene Hackman) and Will Smith's character hijack the Mercedes, will pulls the cat out of the bag. Well in the background you can see that there is a handle for the window which indicates that the Mercedes they are riding in doesn't have power windows. But that particular Benz that they stole was a 99 model so it should have a button instead of a handle. [That handle is not for the windows, it is the door release. The window buttons on a 93-99 S class (the car was a S500 sedan) are on the centre console, not the door.]
Edit
Reynolds wants to discredit Dean so if he ever comes forward with the tape nobody would believe him. But I don't see how that would do anything since the tape speaks for itself and I can't see how any intelligent person would dismiss it simply because the person who had it is questionable. [Tapes could be faked, so any doubt that they can shed on Dean's character will serve to increase public skepticism about what they see - buying them enough time to take alternate action. And remember that they are trying to recover the tape as well - if they do that, then discrediting Dean will ensure that nobody believes anything he says without evidence.]
Edit Corrected by Tailkinker
When the surveillance guys are manipulating camera angles to try to figure out what's in Will Smith's bag, that's impossible.  They were dealing with recordings, you can't change the camera angle after the fact. [They are not changing the actual angle, they are using a computer programme to simulate what the bag would look like from the recording they have.]
Edit
When Will Smith is out rowing with the other lawyer the agents open his locker. They compare the pen, the watch, and the phone but they don't look whether there were any private phone numbers in the memory. [This is because the phone they swap Dean's with doesn't actually work, which we see when he tries to use it, only to get a hissing noise and has to use a pay phone. The fake phone is only used to trace Dean, not to be used as an actual phone. Hence, the info on the real phone is not needed.]
Edit
When the guy is hit by the bus, the surveillance camera shows him lying in the road surrounded by small splashes of blood, but when we cut back to the street through the film camera, there is no blood visible. [Yes, there are blood pools visible when the camera cuts back to the street (just left of dead Jason Lee when they are searching him). It is just difficult to see it properly because of a reflection of light upon the splashes of blood.]
Edit
At the end, when Will Smith is watching the TV, he's watching his own face. The camera is supposed to be in the ceiling, but if you see the TV the camera must be right in front of him. [We don't know the camera is in the ceiling, that is just Robert Dean's assumption. The camera may be in/around the TV, hence the image of Dean comes from straight ahead.]
Edit
In the early scene where Will Smith is confronting the "Mafia Boss" with the video of him consorting with union representatives, the Boss is shown mugging for the camera. Obviously, he knows he is being taped. Immediately thereafter, he starts to threaten Smith, demanding to know who made the tape, as if it had been made surreptitiously. [He wanted to know how Smith got the tape and more importantly, who made the copy so he could make sure no more were produced.]
Edit
In the taxi, the fake Brill brakes to avoid hitting the guy in the wheelchair but is immediately tail-ended by a another car. Instead of being hit by the taxi, the guy and his wheelchair disappear without trace. [This is because the man in the wheelchair has gone past the front of the car, hence the fake Brill's reaction - ie, he sighs with relief. Therefore, when the car hits him from behind, the man in the wheelchair is uninjured.]
Edit

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