Best action movie plot holes of 2012

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

Brave picture

Plot hole: During the scene where Merida gives her speech on "breaking tradition", her mother, as a bear, moves silently behind the majority of the crowd, so they don't see her. Fair enough. However, Merida and her father's clan are all looking in the same general direction (towards the crowd) while she's speaking - how does no one from Merida's clan see a bear moving at the back of the room?

More Brave plot holes
Battleship picture

Plot hole: The Tomahawk Cruise Missiles the Arleigh-Burke Class destroyers carry have a range of approximately 1500km. As soon as Alex got the message from Sam, they could have blown that Saddle Ridge communications facility to kingdom come with just a few cruise missiles. They didn't need to get in range because the entire dome surrounding the Hawaiian Islands was smaller in diameter than the range of the Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. Cruise missiles have internal guidance, so they wouldn't rely on the radar, which was jammed.

More Battleship plot holes
Premium Rush picture

Plot hole: Bobby confronts Wilee on the college campus to give him the envelope. Whilst the confrontation progresses, Wilee gets away from Bobby after distracting him by holding his sandwich by riding his bike off the college campus, onto the main road and never stops. During this ride, he drives past the gaps in several cars and taxis. Within a minute and a half, Bobby then manages to catch up with Wilee. There are two things wrong with the time it took Bobby to reach Wilee. First, there were loads of cars that we would had to have drove past in order to get to him. The problem with this is that Wilee managed to get past the cars using his bike to go through the gaps. Bobby had his car which meant he couldn't have possibly gotten through the gap making him reach Wilee in that amount of time. And second thing wrong with this is, even though Bobby knew where Wilee was taking the envelope too, he still didn't have any way to know the precise direction Wilee was going in to deliver the envelope. (00:11:50 - 00:13:30)

Casual Person

More Premium Rush plot holes
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island picture

Plot hole: As the island is sinking you can see parts break off, like the island is falling apart, but if it does this every 70 years then there wouldn't be an island. It should have completely fallen apart hundreds of years ago.

brianjr0412

More Journey 2: The Mysterious Island plot holes
Men in Black 3 picture

Plot hole: When (future) Agent J and (future) Boris are fighting on top of the large red docking station for the spaceship, Agent J gets shot deliberately by Boris and jumps off the edge of the dock. Then he uses his time travel device to go back in time a few seconds earlier to be able to dodge the shots. There are a few mistakes in this part. 1) There should be another Agent J and Boris there too, as they have gone back in time to that moment again. However in the movie there are only two of them. 2) The injuries sustained by Agent J (the bone spikes in his abdomen) should have remained there when he went back in time. If it were true that you healed once you went back in time into the condition you were in at that moment, then Boris should have grown an arm back when he went back in time. 3) Due to the time loop, Agent J remembers how to dodge the shots, while Boris doesn't remember anything and is surprised by the outcome. (01:29:00 - 01:30:10)

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

Suggested correction: #3 Boris doesn't remember that they just went back in time, as he wasn't doing/holding the Time Jump Device.

unkajes

More Men in Black 3 plot holes
Skyfall picture

Plot hole: Silva spent years planning his revenge against M, yet the ability to carry out his plan depended on conditions that were entirely out of his control, such as being captured by MI-6 despite having no way of knowing that Bond was coming for him, and only escaping custody because Q triggers the Trojan - there's no way Silva could predict when that would happen, could have been hours, days, weeks, or never. He then ambushes M at the courthouse despite having no way of knowing that she would be there that day.

Phaneron

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

Suggested correction: His plan was always to blow a hole in the tube to have a train crash at that location. This would have caused mayhem and take up a lot of resources (police/ambulance/fire). Bond chasing him had no impact on this part of the plan. Then when his team picked him up, his team would have known where M would have been on that day and would have driven him there. With resources on high at the train crash site, it would have made it easier to reach M.

XIII

This aspect is a bit of a plot hole for me too - one of the factors outside Silva's control is when he can escape MI6 custody, which depends on when Q triggers the 'Granborough' Trojan, which Q only spots with a bit of help from Bond. That triggering could have been hours, days, weeks or never - pretty fraught with risk to rely on individual(s) making that happen at a plot-convenient moment... otherwise Silva has a bunch of associates hanging around London for a few days permanently on a few minutes alert for a random event.

More Skyfall plot holes
The Expendables 2 picture

Plot hole: The seaplane should have a watertight hull so the two jumping out the bottom makes no sense when they should have used the same exit at the rear of the plane that they loaded the jet skies with.

More The Expendables 2 plot holes
Stolen picture

Plot hole: As Will and Riley are melting the gold in the bank vault, the temp rises enough that fire alarm goes off. The firefighters somehow get there in a matter of seconds. (01:13:00)

Quantom X

More Stolen plot holes
Lockout picture

Plot hole: Hock sneaks a gun into the prisoner interrogation area because he is told that guns are not allowed there. If the prison was so strict about keeping guns out of that area then they would surely have metal detectors to prevent such a thing from happening. (00:15:25)

Phaneron

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

Suggested correction: Not a plot hole at all. Most of the people who are allowed in those areas will be government employees, who will be deemed trusted enough to follow the rules.

If they won't even allow a member of the Secret Service - the President's own security team - to have a gun in that area, they wouldn't simply trust them to just follow the rules.

Phaneron

More Lockout plot holes
The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse picture

Plot hole: When the zombies have Taylor, The Corpse and Taylor have a conversation while the other zombies just hold him. Zombies would not have just held him without eating for so long. (00:04:20)

Quantom X

More The Amazing Adventures of the Living Corpse plot holes
21 Jump Street picture

Plot hole: In the first arrest scene Jenko (played by Channing Tatum) fails to read the suspect his Miranda Rights and the suspect is later released because of this. Miranda Rights are not read upon arrest nor do they have to be unless the arresting officer is questioning the suspect about an offense. Miranda Rights are more often read during an interview if the crime is that serious but in this instance (possession of controlled substances) the suspect would have most likely been handed over to a patrol unit with a vehicle and taken to jail without being questioned, at least by the arresting officers.

More 21 Jump Street plot holes
Safe House picture

Plot hole: When the CIA detects that Matt is accessing sensitive information to track Frost, they trace Matt's location and find out that he is using a public computer in a cafe. We then see that Matt is viewing the same kind of software, files, etc. that the CIA views at their agency. There is simply no plausible way that a random public computer would have CIA software, or be able to access CIA data at all, regardless of Matt's clearance. The computer itself would have to be on a secure domain.

More Safe House plot holes
The Bourne Legacy picture

Plot hole: The tracker chips that the program participants have surgically implanted in their legs make no sense: (1) Implanting an RF device in an agent who is going undercover in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran etc. is a very efficient way of blowing his cover. (2) The drone pilots are unable to imagine that the agent may remove or shield the chip, despite knowing that these agents are super-intelligent and resourceful. (3) Why does killing the agent switch off the chip? Even if he's blown apart by a Hellfire missile, the chip should still keep chirping away, safe inside the lump of meat that's left.

More The Bourne Legacy plot holes
Foodfight! picture Foodfight! mistake picture

Plot hole: When Dex is rescuing the baby kittens from the Fat Cat Burglar on the hot air balloon, whilst it is flying over the city, the four hairless hamster henchmen fly off the balloon and plummet down onto the street. Dex then saves the baby kittens and lands in the park, where two of the henchmen are shown landing in the park after plummeting. Three problems with this. 1) The henchmen fell before Dex saved the kittens and made his way down to the park, so how did they land on the ground long after Dex landed on the ground? 2) How did they land in the park if they plummeted from above a street? 3) How are there only two henchmen shown landing when four of them were shown falling all at once? (00:04:30)

Casual Person

More Foodfight! plot holes
Underworld: Awakening picture

Plot hole: Selene has been kept in a cryogenic tank for 12 years. And for 12 years the scientists running experiments on her very conveniently kept her boots and skin tight suit in the lab. Not just that: they did not keep them in a locker or in a box, but scattered across different shelves of the glass cabinet where they also store test tubes and big bottles of chemicals. Directly in front of them, in fact. (00:10:00)

Sammo

More Underworld: Awakening plot holes
Jack Reacher picture

Plot hole: When one of the men from the bar fight confronts Reacher at Jeb's house, the man says he hasn't seen Jeb since they got out of jail. Reacher was the only person from the fight to be arrested, all the others ran away. (01:00:30)

More Jack Reacher plot holes
Death Race: Inferno picture

Plot hole: At the end, when billionaire Niles York is mistaken for Frankenstein, how is this possible? anyone who knows him can see it's him, from his appearance (burnt, but not 100%, his face still visible), his voice (doesn't sound like Frankenstein, but does sound like Niles York) & also a simple DNA test would have cleared up his true identity. When he goes back to Terminal Island, people would know it's a different person.

aat666

More Death Race: Inferno 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.