Best action movie plot holes of 2008

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull picture

Plot hole: Hiding in a fridge (or anything else) in order to be conveniently blown out of the way by an exploding nuclear device is absurd beyond belief. The fridge is just so much extra reaction mass and would be vaporised by the expanding nuclear explosion - it wouldn't be daintily picked up and thrown a few kilometers to safety. If it was, why doesn't it land in a shower of similar artifacts which have also been dislodged and thrown around? Incidentally, even if it was thrown out of the way as shown, anyone inside it would be turned into a smear of strawberry jam by the acceleration required to beat the shock and heat wave of a nuclear blast, and then liquefied by the deceleration involved in hitting the ground at that speed.

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Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa picture

Plot hole: The newspaper headline showing young Alex being rescued from a crate is dated April 8, 1972. In the next scene, we see young Alex dancing in the Central Park Zoo, and watching him are Marty, Melman and Gloria as baby animals. This makes no sense at all. In the first film, Marty celebrates his tenth birthday. Key word: tenth. It is also known that the scenes of the main characters as adults take place in the present i.e. Alex confessing to breaking Marty's iPod. Seeing how the animals age quicker than humans, Marty, let alone his three friends, would have to have been born in the mid-1990s and the flashback scenes could not have taken place in 1972.

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Saw V picture

Plot hole: Hoffman is able to implicate Agent Strahm as the mastermind behind the main series of traps in this film by planting Strahm's cell phone at the scene. However, Hoffman is repeatedly shown to be touching things at the scene without wearing gloves, so a forensics sweep of the crime scene afterwards would show Hoffman's fingerprints all over the place and reveal him to be the actual mastermind. Agent Erickson arrives at the crime scene before the two survivors of the traps complete their tests, so the forensics team would have been called in before Hoffman had a chance to remove any evidence that would incriminate himself. As a forensics officer himself, Hoffman should know better.

Phaneron

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The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor picture

Plot hole: Zi Juan tells the rest of the group when they are in Shangri La that she will take the first watch at the entrance and guard against the emperor getting in. A few shots later, she then decides to have a conversation with her daughter nowhere near the entrance, and now with no-one guarding, means he gets in unchallenged.

GalahadFairlight

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Suggested correction: A character briefly leaving their watch to deliver important information as Zi Juan was doing isn't a mistake, and it's definitely not a plot hole, since it in no way contradicts the movie's logic or creates a hole in the narrative. At best, Zi Juan was being a little foolish leaving her watch, but a character being a little foolish isn't a "movie mistake." After all, people make foolish choices all the time in real life. Plus, as demonstrated by the movie, it doesn't really matter anyways - the Emperor's powers are back, so she wouldn't have been able to stop him even if she had kept watch.

TedStixon

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Stargate: Continuum picture

Plot hole: In the scene where Ba'al goes through the stargate and arrives in 1939, the event horizon from the stargate puts a hole in the haul of the ship. Later when SG1 goes through the stargate the hole is covered with ice. The event horizon created from SG1 would have been the same as the previous one and removed the ice from the hole.

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Journey to the Center of the Earth picture

Plot hole: We don't see any herbivores in the underground world - just fish and little birds. A T-Rex would need lots of big game to survive.

Jacob La Cour

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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.

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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.

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Wanted picture

Plot hole: Just after the shootout in the grocery store, Wesley's dad nearly runs him over in the pet truck. Before this, it seemed as though he may have wanted to kill him, but he just hadn't gotten a clear shot. It's highly doubtful that he would have trusted Fox, his enemy, to swipe Wesley into the car literally one second before he would have been plowed by the truck. Being the best assassin in the entire Brotherhood, there's no reason to think that he could act careless at a time like this, especially when doing so could easily cost the life of his son.

Knever

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Doomsday picture

Plot hole: Rhona Mitra is told she can't fly into Scotland because it's a "no fly zone." But it's all part of the UK, and she's being sent in as part of a UK government operation. The only group enforcing the no fly zone would be the UK government, so they could send her in via whatever means they like.

Jon Sandys

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Transporter 3 picture

Plot hole: In the large chase scene, Frank hits the shoulder at 140kph (~85mph) but the car doesn't shake, slide, or act in any way like it should. Later, when he's moving around 220kph (~135mph), he somehow manages to end up on two wheels. To top it all of when he ends up between the semis he appears to be moving just barely faster than them which would mean he had to slow down somewhere. When his wheels make contact with the one semi the car doesn't jump or skip as expected because it's not moving very fast compared to the semi. I know this scene is for effect, but they could at least attempt to make it somewhat based on real physics.

zephalis

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Tropic Thunder picture

Plot hole: In the scene where Speedman and Lazarus are discussing their acting and Lazarus tells him to never go full retard. It shows these two leading the group, however they stop and talk for quite a while, and the rest of the group are nowhere to be seen until Speedman and Lazarus start moving again. The group finally caught up with them. If at this time, Speedman was still leading the way with the map, how could the group even find these two after being left behind enough distance that this conversation could take place?

Quantom X

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Punisher: War Zone picture

Plot hole: Even though he knows the FBI is looking for him, the Punisher shows up at Agent Donatelli's funeral (which is being attended by many FBI agents) in broad daylight. This is completely out of character for someone who will go as far as living in the sewer to avoid capture.

Phaneron

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Taken picture

Plot hole: When Brian is on the boat, we see 3 girls from the auction being ushered into the sheikh's stateroom. He eliminates all the bodyguards, the last of who is the leader with the knife, and who is the only person who knows which of the girls is Kimmi. When Brian enters the stateroom, the sheikh is holding her at gunpoint. How did he know she was Brian's daughter?

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Suggested correction: This is a question, not a plot hole. It is possible the man who bought Kim at the auction had to explain to his boss, the sheikh, why he bought her. He probably told him about the troubles he has had and the possibility that this man is still searching for his daughter, the girl in front of him. Hearing the fighting going on the sheikh correctly assumes this is the same man and tries to use her as a shield against him when he enters and threatens her with a knife.

lionhead

Don't think so - lot of probable's. The Sheik's right-hand man would have assumed Brian was dead as St Clair's men had captured him, but he spotted him on the boat and only told his boss he would 'kill the dog', not which girl he had come for. Agree correction - she was held by knife-point.

He bought a girl he was not instructed to buy, for a lot of money. Of course he had to explain that to the Sheikh.

lionhead

Not a plot hole, not even a contrivance. The sheik just grabbed whichever girl that was with him. It didn't matter who she was, it was just a case of "let me go or 'll kill this random, innocent girl." The fact that it was Kim was a simple coincidence (1 in 3 chance).

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The Machine Girl picture

Plot hole: Ami's arm was sliced off, and the wound went untreated (you can tell it was not cauterized in later scenes) for a number of hours before it was stitched up. All this time, we see her loosing ludicrous amounts of blood. Yet, Miki looses her foot, and dies of blood loss only a few minutes later, despite her wound and blood loss being much less severe than Ami's. An inconsistency in the style done solely for dramatic purposes.

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Eagle Eye picture

Plot hole: This observation regards a computer whose memory architecture is on a physical scale (e.g., size) that allows multiple humans to enter and maneuver within it. With electronic components, scale imposes a design limitation such that the greater the distance between components, the more time is required for a signal to traverse between components. This computer's massive size would assure substantial performance limitations which are inconsistent with the plot line of the computer's overall power.

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