During the brief occasional shots of the satellite you can hear Morse code. The code translates as CQ, which is amateur radio speak for 'is anybody there?' - hardly spy stuff. See more...
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15 biggest Harry Potter mistake pictures
Directed by Tony Scott, starring Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Lisa Bonet, Will Smith (add more)
Revealing: Near the end of the film, after the shootout, there's a shot with the camera zooming in on a newspaper at Will Smith's front door. If you pause it right once the headline fills the top of the screen, you'll notice all the paragraphs are just repeated, word for word.
Factual error: When the monitor with all the information on Brill is shown, Afghanistan is misspelled as "Afganistan".
Audio problem: After Will Smith's shoes had both been discarded when they found bugs in them, he runs down the stairs, but you can clearly hear shoes running down the stairs when he's supposedly not wearing any.
Factual error: When requesting images from the satellite, the position (latitude and longitude) is always given in degrees and minutes (but NOT seconds), and a few moments later they get a picture centered on the person they are looking for. Now a minute equals a nautical mile (or 1.85 kilometers), so with a position given in degrees and minutes you'd get a region bigger than 3 square kilometers.... which makes it impossible to find a person that fast (especially in a crowded town).
Factual error: During an early part of the movie, Will Smith is driving with his wife in their SUV. While the movie is supposed to be set in DC, you will see a piece of neon artwork outside their vehicle. This artwork is on Olive street in downtown LA, underneath the California Plaza complex.
Continuity: 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.
Continuity: The business card given to Dan Zavitz by Bobby Dean in the lingerie shop is not the same business card removed from his pocket by the agent after he gets hit by the fire truck (second timecode). The email address along the bottom of the card has changed, In the first shot, it's 'rdean@next.net' and in the second it's 'rdean@silverbergblake.com'.
Other: When Daniel Zavitz realizes that his video contains the murder of the Congressman he plays it several times showing the portion when the man attacks the Congressman. The Congressman opens his car door and then closes it before he is even attacked.
Continuity: In the scene in the lingerie store Will Smith is talking to a blonde assistant. She has a piece of her hair tucked up behind her ear, but as the shot changes her hair is down loose again. When the shot changes again the piece of hair is behind her ear again. This happens roughly about 3-4 times.
Continuity: When Jason Lee gets out of his car to his video hutch, the driver's side window can clearly be seen to be 15 cms or so wound up. When he returns to the car with the incriminating tape in hand, the window is fully down.
Factual error: Satellite images only work on clear days with no clouds. But most of the days shown in the movie are cloudy which would make most of the spying impossible.
Continuity: When Brill blows up his hideout, he is in his truck with Robert. In the background, the building collapses. The shot changes, then the next shot is of the same building collapsing, but from a different angle, even though the building has already collapsed.
Other: At the end of the film, Dean can see himself in his TV. He looks up to the fire alerter, assuming the camera filming him is up there. The film camera then also pans up to the fire alerter, indicating the camera is there, too. For this angle, the picture in the TV is wrong, as it is taken from the point of view of the TV.
Factual error: While escaping from thugs in Hackman's pickup, Smith points a sawed-off shotgun in front Hackman's face and fires at the baddies. Hackman should have been deaf, but he didn't even blink.
Continuity: When Dean's wife is preparing to take their son to his friend's house, Dean is holding a bottle of wine near his shirt collar. In the following shot, the bottle is down near his chest.
Other: In the scene where Fiedler is looking up Robert Dean and Rachel Banks' college history, both Dean and Banks' student numbers are the same.
Other: When Will Smith checks into the hotel and his credit cards are invalid, we see that the time is 5:38 and it is daylight outside. The only problem with this is that it is supposed to be around December given all the Christmas decorations. It would be dark then in the Baltimore, not soaked with daylight.
Continuity: Towards the end, when Brill and Robert have bugged the Congressman's room, Robert has Babe in his hands, then it cuts away and back, and Babe is not in his hands but is behind him near the pillow of the bed.
Factual error: When the NSA is investigating Dean's history, Jack Black claims that he and Rachel Banks shared the same address their sophomore year at Georgetown. However, Georgetown students are required to live on campus their sophomore year, and there is no co-ed housing on Georgetown campus.
Continuity: In the scene where Robert Dean and Rachel Banks are having lunch in the diner, the mustard bottle is seen in two different places. It starts out to the left side of his plate, kind of behind the napkin dispenser. When she gives him the tape, it moves to the front of the dispenser. In the next shot it goes back behind.
Visible crew/equipment: When Will Smith and Gene Hackman are fleeing the fortress, Will shoots at the pursuing truck with the shotgun, causing it to flip. As it lands on its top, the tube used to launch the pole that flipped it is visible.
Continuity: When Dean is lying down in the back of the womens station-wagon, you can clearly see the driver's neck and hair. On a close-up of the driver, you can see that there is a head-rest in the way. On return to the wide shot, the headrest has obviously been removed.
Continuity: When all of the politician's 'henchmen' are leaving 'the office' one of them is wearing sunglasses, that he did not previously have on in that scene.
Plot hole: As the characters arrive at 'the Jar', Brill informs Dean that it is entirely cut off from the outside world (no communication lines or radio waves). Yet somehow he is able to access a Government database from this very location.
Continuity: At the end when Will Smith is flipping through the channels to find out that his house is still bugged (by Gene Hackman this time), the band aid on his head changes sides between the TV view and the live view.
Other: There is a scene with Will Smith is supposedly at the FBI or CIA headquarters (the location is subtitled), but the very distinctive looking building is the HUD - Housing and Urban Development building on 7th St.
Continuity: In the beginning scene with Jason Robards and Jon Voight talking on the bench, there seems to be a difference in temperature between shots. When there is a close up of Jon Voight, you can see his breath in the cold air. When there is a close up of Jason Robards, no breath is visible at all.
Continuity: After nana picked up Will's kids and Will Smith is lying in the back of the car, look closely at nana's seatbelt. In the first shot it's on, in the next shot she doesn't wear it anymore and in next shot its on again.
You may also like: Hancock | Smokey and the Bandit | The Bourne Supremacy | Top Gun | House, M.D.
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