The Fugitive

The Fugitive (1993)

36 corrected entries

(26 votes)

Corrected entry: Harrison Ford insisted on doing the stunt where he jumps out of the overturned prison vehicle to escape the oncoming train himself.

Correction: Completely false, since there was no "stunt" involved. The image of Kimble jumping off the upturned bus was a special effect using a blue screen.

Corrected entry: When Kimble reaches the hospital the first time he takes a box and carries it inside, as if he is one of the delivery guys. Why does nobody notice him? Wouldn't the delivery men see that he isn't one of them? And wouldn't people notice his unkempt appearance and ask questions of him?

Correction: This is not a plot hole. The hospital is busy, with many other people walking around, and as we learn from his colleagues throughout the movie, Dr. Kimble is very smart and he would not do anything to draw attention to himself. Also, Kimble looks at the delivery truck (presumably to see if the driver sees him) before grabbing the box and entering the hospital.

Mister Ed

Corrected entry: In the scene where Dr. Richard Kimble - posing as a janitor in a prosthetics lab - prints off a list of patients with a particular type of arm prosthesis, he quickly crumples up the paper and shoves it in his pocket. In the next scene, where Kimble is shown in a telephone booth calling people from the list, the paper has magically smoothed itself out.

Correction: It's not completely smooth. He probably uncrumpled it and pressed it out against something flat. People do that all the time.

Corrected entry: When Richard Kimble is running from the U.S. Marshals, to blend in with the parade he finds a green hat in the garbage can, but notice he approaches it like he knew it was in there to begin with.

Correction: Maybe he could see it from his vantage point. He's not that far away, it's a mesh can, and it's a very visible bright green.

Corrected entry: When Kimble is looking at the apartment, the landlady and son are speaking Polish. The landlady asks her son a question and he answers "Da" which is Russian. Polish is "tak". (00:55:50)

Correction: In fact the landlady's son is speaking Polish - he says "ta" which is the ordinary form of "tak". The English parallel would be "yeah" instead of "yes".

Corrected entry: When the car drives away at the end, with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the back, the windows are clearly shut - however, just seconds before that they are clearly open, note especially when the door is closing, you can see it then!

Correction: I just watched the movie, the windows are down during the entire scene. As the car drives away the windows are still down since there are no reflections from exterior lights on them. Something that would be evident in a night scene shot on a brightly lit street.

Corrected entry: Wouldn't Kimble need a password to get into the computer database when he is getting a list for the patients with prosthetic limbs?

Gavin Jackson

Correction: The computer is up and running when he accesses it. Someone left it logged on. Dumb idea, but it happens all the time.

Corrected entry: The prosecution uses Kimble's wife's 911 call as the most compelling evidence against him, since she says, "Richard. . .he's trying to kill me." Fair enough. But the first thing she says when the 911 operator is "There's someone in my house." As in an intruder, and not her husband. Why his lawyer doesn't jump on this is beyond me, as this should provide the jury with reasonable doubt, if not outright proof of Kimble's innocence.

Correction: I am not convinced by this phone call, too, but she didn't say there was somebody in her house. She said: "He's still in the house" or something similar. The operator then asked: "Did I hear you right? Someone's in your house?"

Correction: The prosecutor may have said that Kimble's wife didn't know it was him at first.

Corrected entry: After Harrison Ford rents the apartment, he dyes his hair dark brown/black to add to his disguise. Later on, it magically returns to its original sandy grey colour.

Correction: He's washed the dye out of his hair (remember, we see him leaving a hotel). People know what he looks like with the black hair, so there's no point in sticking with the disguise. In fact, reverting back to his original appearance might help throw people off.

Corrected entry: When Tommy Lee Jones goes to the one-armed man's apartment, the one-armed man enters and says "I hell to hope you are a cop" instead of "I hope to hell you are a cop."

Correction: No, he doesn't - he says "I sure as hell hope you're a cop".

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: In the St. Patrick's Day parade scene, Richard grabs a green hat from the trash can. This hat is completely different from the hat he is wearing later on that scene.

Correction: The top of the hat was flattened; he simply pushed it back out.

Corrected entry: Are we really supposed to believe that when Kimble falls over 30 feet onto the top of the (metal) elevator, he does not have even a scratch on him (let alone being dead.). He even falls directly onto his face, its just way to much to even be slightly believable.

Correction: The height from which he fell, which was actually more like 20 feet, is a very tricky height. Land wrong, and you can easily die. Land well, and it is not at all uncommon to walk away completely unharmed and unscathed. Kimble does not land on his face. His whole body absorbed the impact, making it even more believable that he was OK.

Corrected entry: When Richard is being interrogated by police and tells them about the one-armed man, he says "You find this man." Later on, when recalling that moment, he remembers it as "You find that man."

Correction: Not everybody has a photographic memory. It makes sense that when recalling such a terrible part of his life later that he would not remember it exactly. This is done very realistically.

Correction: U.S. Marshals are fully capable of finding and apprehending any fugitive of the law. If Harrison Ford hadn't been convicted yet, the U.S. Marshals wouldn't have anything to do with the case, but because he was a convicted murderer at the time who was now a fugitive, the U.S. Marshals would use their full power to apprehend him.

Corrected entry: There's a fundamental flaw with this whole film. In the United States being innocent doesn't entitle you to escape from prison; it isn't even legal grounds for appeal. Kimble may not have murdered his wife, but he is guilty of escape from legal custody, resisting arrest (by threatening a U.S. Marshall with a gun which is a federal offense) and dozens of lesser charges.

Correction: You're right that Kimble is guilty of these things, but how does that constitute a mistake? Nothing in the movie ever indicated he wasn't guilty of them. Nobody ever said he escaped because he was entitled to, and there is no proof that he won't be charged with any of the lesser offences you mention. All the movie shows is that Tommy Lee Jones believes (and cares) that he didn't kill his wife, and that he takes Kimble's handcuffs off as soon as they get in the police car. None of that makes this a mistake.

Corrected entry: In the scene where Harrison Ford is being chased out of Cook County Hospital, he tries to get lost in the St. Patrick's day parade. He takes his tan rain coat off, having a blue shirt underneath so that he will look different. Notice that when he takes his coat off in the middle of the parade, the next shot shows him having absolutely no coat.

Correction: He dropped it on the ground - you can see it in one shot.

Continuity mistake: Kimble dyes his hair very dark to escape detection and dyed hair fades over time. For the rest of the movie his hair noticeably goes from darker shades to lighter shades and back again showing that the scenes were shot non-sequentially on different days with a fair amount of time in between.

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Trivia: After his escape, it shows Harrison getting on a train marked with the name "Kimball" and then in the next shot, a helicopter flies over a hotel called "Harrison".

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Question: Towards the end, before the confrontation with Kimble and Nicholls, the guy who was tracing Kimble's phone records tells the Marshalls that Kimble telephoned Sykes on the night of his wife's murder. But obviously it wasn't Kimble calling Sykes, it was Sykes using Kimble's phone. But why would Sykes be calling himself?

jenn_s_h85

Chosen answer: He didn't. A key plot point is that Nichols borrowed Kimble's car on the night of the murder. The call to Sykes, which is expressly stated by the marshals as being on Kimble's car phone, was from Nichols, presumably arranging to meet so that he could give Sykes Kimble's keys to get into his house to lie in wait for him.

Tailkinker

Thank you for explaining it. I've seen it several times and never realised how it went down.

And Tommy Lee Jones tells Kimble that they knew Nichols called Skyes from his car, but how? Wouldn't the more logical answer have been that the US Marshals thought that Kimble called Sykes from his car to tell the killer his wife was home alone? There is no way the US Marshalls would have known that the Kimble let Nichols borrow his call - that's the mistake in the movie! It actually should have made the Marshalls suspicious of Kimble, not exonerate him.

The Marshals know Kimble let Nichols borrow his car because Kimble told the police when he was initially interviewed following the murder. He gave a detailed account of his actions and whereabouts that night and mentioned that Nichols had borrowed his car. It didn't seem suspicious to the police at the time because Richard claimed he fought with a one armed man he didn't recognize; a story the police did not believe because there was no evidence of this and Kimble's wife "identified" her attacker as Richard. Gerard puts everything together when he realises that Nichols lied about knowing Lentz.

BaconIsMyBFF

How did Sam figure out that Nichols borrowed the vehicle and made the call to Sykes and gave him keys, etc? I know in the laundry he reveals that he knew this but when/how did he figure it out?

Answer: This is more of a question really. What kind of defense attorney did this high dollar, Dr. Kimble hire who do not show their defendant pictures of the one-armed men the police question? How do his attorneys not ask him "OK, which of these one-armed men did you fight with in your house?"

The prosecution is not required to inform the defense of every person the police interview or question. They are only required to give the defense whatever evidence they have against the accused. Simply questioning someone in a perceived dead only counts as evidence against the accused if the prosecutor mentions it in court. If the prosecutor were to say "We interviewed a one-armed man named Sykes and he says he doesn't know you", then Kimble's defense would be required to be given access to Sykes. We can assume this never happened.

BaconIsMyBFF

The Chicago police DID question Sykes after the Kimble murder. Review the scene where Sykes returns to his apartment after Kimble has been there. Girard starts asking Sykes questions, at first Sykes says he doesn't know anything about Kimble but then "remembers" that he had been interviewed by the police right after the Kimble murder. However, Sykes says that he gave the police an alibi, with 15 people supposedly confirming that Sykes was on a business trip and not in Chicago. The movie then implies that Sykes had been a Chicago cop and lost his arm "in the line of duty." Remember that the Chicago police focused on Kimble pretty quickly. Their investigators may have interviewed Sykes, but they likely didn't even come close to considering him as a potential murderer. Even with Sykes likely matching Kimble's description of the one-armed man, the police likely saw Sykes as a former cop... A former cop who had an alibi confirmed by 15 people. As I understand it, prosecutors don't have to tell defense attorneys about everyone that the cops question. They only have to tell the defense about potential witnesses that might be called in connection to the criminal trial. In this scenario, Sykes wouldn't have been part of the criminal trial (Again, supposedly on a business trip confirmed by 15 people on the night of the murder) and thus Kimble and his lawyers would never have known about his existence.

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