Best crime movie plot holes of all time

Please vote as you browse around to help the best rise to the top.

The Siege picture

Plot hole: Elise and Samir are in the back seat of Hub's car near a park, and Hub and his partner are standing outside the car. No one else is in the car. They pass notes as they know they are being watched and listened to. Elise and Samir walk away, and Hub and his partner get back into the front seats of the car and drive off. Suddenly a man jumps out of Hub's side of the front of the car and leads the soldiers in a foot chase. But it turns out not to be Hub, but a decoy, so Hub and partner can slip away. But this guy was not in the car before and they've been under surveillance, so this guy couldn't get in the car unseen and the decoy chase wouldn't have worked if he had been seen getting in the car. (01:33:40 - 01:36:15)

johnrosa

More The Siege plot holes
Men at Work picture

Plot hole: When Carl is stuffed in the oil drum, he's making lots of noise and strugling to get out. Yet one of the bad guys can keep the lid closed with one hand laying flat on top. Carl could have lifted it up with ease.

RoyT

More Men at Work plot holes
Luck of the Draw picture

Plot hole: In the several scenes at the hotel when Carlo and Bonehead confront Jack there are a total of 9 shots fired in the hallway and another 30 ultimately fired in the room as well as a chair thrown through a window. Although we were able to hear a baby crying in another room when Jack initially climbed the stairs no one seems to hear the monumental confrontation for a very long time or look outside their rooms to see Bonehead lying dead in the hallway. Carlo has an enormous amount of time to patiently question Jack and make phone calls. When sirens do arise after a long while, the very first responders are the Feds screeching up in their big red Caprice followed by some police. Somehow the US Treasury Department is able to get to the scene faster than the police.

More Luck of the Draw plot holes
Money Talks picture

Plot hole: When Chris Tucker phones his girlfriend from from the mansion, we see the 2 detectives, staked out in front of the girlfriend's house listening in on the call and trace the call to Beverly Hills. At the end of the call Tucker tells her that he's "on his way over". The detectives apparently aren't too concerned about this or forget, as when Tucker shows up, they are still casually sitting in the van. They haven't called for backup to set up an ambush or anything, no, -one of them is asleep and the other decides they should go check out the girlfriend's apartment after seeing a light go on.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: As we who have seen the film all know, ol boy with the grey/white hair is actually a crooked cop and the younger hothead listens to him. Even when Tucker shows up at the house he still doesn't reveal that he is a crooked cop, not until he has the diamonds does he do that. It makes perfect sense for them not to call for backup, and they use her turning the light back on as proof that he has shown up showing that they heard him say he was coming.

More Money Talks plot holes
Maniac Cop 2 picture

Plot hole: When the clerk is scratching the lottery tickets for the robber, when he scratches the second ticket he only scratches off two out of three numbers on the ticket, but still says it's not a winner.

More Maniac Cop 2 plot holes
Leon picture

Plot hole: Towards the end of the movie, Leon dies and Mathilda heads to see Tony. Tony gives her some spending money and tells her to get back in school. The nighttime scene suggests that she spends at least part of the night wandering the streets. Presumably at daybreak, she takes the tram car and returns to The Spencer School, where she talks to the school administrator. When the administrator asks Mathilda to tell the truth about what happened to her, Mathilda says in essence, "... I lived with the greatest guy. He was a hitman, the best in town. He died this morning..." This morning? Seems more like roughly 24 hours have passed since Leon died, so what Mathilda says is inconsistent with the scene sequence. (Special note - this is from the International/extended DVD edition. I can't say whether this exact sequence is in the shorter domestic DVD version.) (02:06:03)

More Leon plot holes
Demolition Man picture

Plot hole: When Spartan jumps through the window in the excavation scene of the museum, he crashes into a room with bottles of drink on the shelves. Surely this room too would have been filled in and the window smashed during the earthquake, and the museum wouldn't have bothered to excavate it as it can't be seen from above due to the blanked out window. So what is that room doing there? (00:49:20)

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: It is not an excavation. It is only made to appear like an excavation for the museum; it is all decor to display the 20th century items like the car.

lionhead

More Demolition Man plot holes
Angels & Demons picture

Plot hole: Towards the end, Patrick takes the 5kt bomb into a helicopter and climbs it away to safety. The problem with that is that the helicopters have a rather low rate of climb - ~10 m/s for military helicopters, less than that for civilian ones. This is the rate of climb at low altitudes, and it is with altitude. He had less than 5 minutes to climb, which would put the bomb at most 3000 meters above the city, and more realistically, one tenth that - just about the optimum height for the bomb to inflict major damage on the Vatican city and the center of Rome.

More Angels & Demons plot holes
Following picture

Plot hole: When Bill is robbing the Old Man's safe, he is not wearing any gloves.

More Following plot holes
Yamakasi picture

Plot hole: When Michelin is trying to sell the stolen objects, he says he wants 227,700 Francs for them. The problem is that they need 400,000 Francs for Jamil and even if they also stole money, I'm not sure it was as much as that.

Dr Wilson

More Yamakasi plot holes
The Dark Knight picture

Plot hole: The Nomex survival suit that Bruce gets from Lucius Fox in Batman Begins is bulletproof, knife proof, and can stop anything but a straight-shot, per Fox. All Bruce did was spray paint over it to make the batsuit. But in the beginning of The Dark Knight, Batman gets mauled by a dog which chews through the suit and cuts Bruce's arm, causing him to need stitches.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: The suit still has seams, through which the dogs can bite.

The suit he was wearing is knife proof, meaning there's aren't suppose to be any "seams" for a dog to bite through. It was the later suit he requested that would be vulnerable to knife attacks.

Bishop73

Lucius told Bruce in Batman Begins that it would stop a knife, he didn't say it was knife proof. This was likely in reference to protecting vital organs from stab attacks, etc, not the weakest areas in his armor from dog bites. There was always going to be flexibility, protection, and weight consideration trade-offs for optimization purposes with any armor he wore, not just his 2nd.

More The Dark Knight plot holes
Joker picture

Plot hole: Arthur's appearance on the talk show makes hardly any sense. The show is a close port of Johnny Carson's Tonight show, for a huge audience, and yet he receives no screening at all, they put him (someone NOBODY in the staff knows the first thing about) on the air literally without a clue of what he is gonna do or say, and wearing a highly controversial costume. And, when he murders Murray, it is implied that everyone was able to see him doing that right away and he is cut 'off the air' at some point, as if the show were really live, which is preposterous for this sort of program outside of specific events (similar to how in contemporary TV "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", is not live). Even earlier when Arthur opened the letter his mom addressed to Wayne, you could hear the end credits of "Live with Murray Franklin" with the announcer saying the show is "Taped live in front of a studio audience." (00:48:00)

Sammo

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: I don't see this is a problem due to the fact that we can't be sure what really happens as apposed to what only happens in Arthur's mind. So if the whole TV show appearance is just another fantasy, he would have skipped the who screening process.

You are free to treat the whole movie as something where things don't make sense because in the fan theory of your liking it's all meant to have subtle hints that the movie is all a fantasy, but the movie does not present that particular talk show scene as a dream sequence. It'd be silly to nitpick the logic in the scene when he is picked from the audience by Murray at the beginning because it's obviously presented as nothing more than his fantasy, but his appearance on the show is what the movie built up to up to that point and is not treated as a parenthesis where logic should be suspended, nor disproven like the scenes with his girlfriend standing in.

Sammo

More Joker plot holes
The Fast and the Furious picture

Plot hole: In the first street race, you see 4 people shift into 1st gear, but when the Latino guy says go, Dom shifts into first gear. That would mean there were 5 cars in the race, but there were only 4. (00:18:17)

More The Fast and the Furious plot holes
Kids picture

Plot hole: When Jenny goes into the bathroom and asks Casper where Telly is, Casper says he is in Steven's parent's room sleeping with a girl. How would he know where they were, since he was in the bathroom for the majority of the party, especially when Telly and Darcy came in from outside?

More Kids plot holes
Road To Perdition picture

Plot hole: When Sullivan shoots Connor Rooney at the end, he flicks the door and we see the dead body. However the wall and some of the floor have loads of dried blood on it when he was only shot seconds before.

More Road To Perdition plot holes
Sleepers picture

Plot hole: In the scene where Lorenzo gives the evidence to the policeman (in the back of King Benny's policeman-nephew's car), he gives him a gun with shell casings and Adam Styler's prints on the gun. Where exactly did he procure these items?

More Sleepers plot holes
Saw IV picture

Plot hole: Rigg plays the woman's tape without rewinding it and it starts at the start of the tape. The woman would have listened to the tape to know the knife was under the TV. But why would she rewind the tape to the beginning after? (00:27:00)

Ssiscool

More Saw IV plot holes
Blue Steel picture

Plot hole: Megan is suspended because the police were not able to find the gun the robber had (stolen from Eugene at the scene) and believed that she had killed an unarmed man. This is very unrealistic because surely they would have interviewed all of the hostages/witnesses at the robbery and each would have easily confirmed that the robber had a gun, and possibly that Eugene might have been missing right after the incident.

More Blue Steel plot holes
Dead Presidents picture

Plot hole: Jose is the only one carrying the bag of money, then he gets killed, in the next scene Anthony and the others have the bag on the table though none of them were carrying one besides Jose.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Kirby and Klingon were both running with bags of money.

More Dead Presidents plot holes
Pacific Heights picture

Plot hole: Hayes continues his harassment by calling the police and provokes Drake into assaulting him. When the police come and sees Hayes injured, they take Drake away immediately without asking any questions or investigating. No law authorities would ever take away someone with mere assumptions or without investigating, regardless of a history of Drake trying to force Hayes out by shutting off the utilities. Completely unrealistic.

More Pacific Heights plot holes

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.