Enemy of the State

Enemy of the State (1998)

23 corrected entries

(7 votes)

Corrected entry: How on earth can the computer guy tell that Mr. Dean's nanny doesn't shave her legs, given that in the one scene she has, she is wearing trousers. Odd.

Correction: This doesn't seem to be an error - the team have been conducting surveillance on the house, so would have had ample time to discover this fact.

Corrected entry: 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.

Correction: It doesn't change side, the image on the screen is a mirror image, so the band-aid stays on his left side, the same side as his watch and ring. In the TV image, you see the right hand being waved (no watch or ring) and the band-aid is on the opposite side.

Corrected entry: When they enter the "jar" at the end of the movie, the cat in one cut is locked out of the fence and the next cut the cat is in the fence and running up the stairs.

Correction: The gate closes with the cat outside, that's correct. However when Brill is putting the stairs fully down we see a camerashot from behind the gate and it is moving and opening, check the space between the wire-mesh fence. So the cat has opened the gate, easy thing to do as she could just push against it because she was on the outside.

Ronnie Bischof

Corrected entry: When the politician is murdered, the murderer walks up behind him as he opens the front door of his car. But when the Daniel Zavitz examines the tape of it, the politician is opening the back door.

Correction: The murdered politician opens the back door in reality and on the video. Look at the frame of the door, it is rounded at the back, indicating that it is the back door. Then the murderer openes the front door to put the dead politician behind the wheel. Check the frame here as well, sharp corner on the back and rounded in front. Everything is correct.

Ronnie Bischof

Corrected entry: In the scene where Gene is talking to Jon there are clear skies and it's sunny. As soon as Gene starts running it's raining.

Correction: Gene has a plastic cover on his hat so rain is expected. But more importantly; it's a different scene when we see him running.

tw_stuart

Corrected entry: Towards the end of the movie, Brill, in the van outside the restaurant, says "This guy's going down and he's gonna take all of you with him. Trust me on this." However, when we are at the FBI interview room, the recording of the same conversation is missing the line "Trust me on this." (01:50:05 - 01:58:55)

Correction: The scene in the FBI interview room is not intended to be a duplicate of the earlier conversations, it is some highlights to show what happened so of course some parts are missing.

tw_stuart

Corrected entry: In the shoot up at the end of the film, the crooked politician (the guy who is chasing Will Smith, and who ordered the killing at the start) is punched in the face. If you watch it slowly, his glasses fall off twice within the second after he is punched.

Correction: Firstly he's not punched, he's pushed, and the use of slow motion for something minor invalidates this.

tw_stuart

Corrected entry: When Zavitz is looking through the videotape from the lake, it is first black & white when there are just some birds. But when the killing on the other side of the lake is shown, the video suddenly turns to colour.

Correction: Zavitz is watching the video with two seperate windows on his computer. The NSA agents who raided his home said he had digital compression equipment so Zavitz could have set the "main" video in B&W and color in the window he zoomed in on.

Mister Ed

Corrected entry: When Gene Hackman is in the lift stripping bugs from Will Smith the surveillance van moves to get a better position. As it pulls out it clearly hits a parked car on its right side. When the van is next seen turning a corner to get the better position there is not even a scratch on the side of the vehicle.

Correction: The vehicle the van hits has plastic bumpers and may have just bounced off, plus, the shot of the van turning afterwards is too dark and too short for us to see any damage.

Mister Ed

Corrected entry: When the people at the NSA realize that Will Smith and Gene Hackman are at a convenience store, they look at a video taken from their satellite twenty minutes earlier. They obviously didn't program their satellite to watch the convenience store so how did it look at that area by itself?

MARK CICCARELLO

Correction: Hackman tells Smith to stay put. Smith gets out and makes a call on the pay phone which the NSA then traces, finds their location and subsequently they obtain the footage of them in the convenience store.

Corrected entry: After Brill (Gene Hackman) and Will Smith's character hijack the Mercedes, will pulls the cat out of the bag. Well in the background you can see that there is a handle for the window which indicates that the Mercedes they are riding in doesn't have power windows. But that particular Benz that they stole was a 99 model so it should have a button instead of a handle.

Correction: That handle is not for the windows, it is the door release. The window buttons on a 93-99 S class (the car was a S500 sedan) are on the centre console, not the door.

Corrected entry: Reynolds wants to discredit Dean so if he ever comes forward with the tape nobody would believe him. But I don't see how that would do anything since the tape speaks for itself and I can't see how any intelligent person would dismiss it simply because the person who had it is questionable.

Correction: Tapes could be faked, so any doubt that they can shed on Dean's character will serve to increase public skepticism about what they see - buying them enough time to take alternate action. And remember that they are trying to recover the tape as well - if they do that, then discrediting Dean will ensure that nobody believes anything he says without evidence.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When the surveillance guys are manipulating camera angles to try to figure out what's in Will Smith's bag, that's impossible. They were dealing with recordings, you can't change the camera angle after the fact.

Correction: They are not changing the actual angle, they are using a computer programme to simulate what the bag would look like from the recording they have.

Corrected entry: When Will Smith is out rowing with the other lawyer the agents open his locker. They compare the pen, the watch, and the phone but they don't look whether there were any private phone numbers in the memory.

Correction: This is because the phone they swap Dean's with doesn't actually work, which we see when he tries to use it, only to get a hissing noise and has to use a pay phone. The fake phone is only used to trace Dean, not to be used as an actual phone. Hence, the info on the real phone is not needed.

Corrected entry: When the guy is hit by the bus, the surveillance camera shows him lying in the road surrounded by small splashes of blood, but when we cut back to the street through the film camera, there is no blood visible.

Correction: Yes, there are blood pools visible when the camera cuts back to the street (just left of dead Jason Lee when they are searching him). It is just difficult to see it properly because of a reflection of light upon the splashes of blood.

Corrected entry: At the end, when Will Smith is watching the TV, he's watching his own face. The camera is supposed to be in the ceiling, but if you see the TV the camera must be right in front of him.

Correction: We don't know the camera is in the ceiling, that is just Robert Dean's assumption. The camera may be in/around the TV, hence the image of Dean comes from straight ahead.

Corrected entry: In the early scene where Will Smith is confronting the "Mafia Boss" with the video of him consorting with union representatives, the Boss is shown mugging for the camera. Obviously, he knows he is being taped. Immediately thereafter, he starts to threaten Smith, demanding to know who made the tape, as if it had been made surreptitiously.

Correction: He wanted to know how Smith got the tape and more importantly, who made the copy so he could make sure no more were produced.

That's not made clear in the film. Yes he later asks how he got it, but before and even after he keeps saying, "who made the tape?" And eventually he says, "I wanna know who made the tape, and I wanna know in a week." Which giving him a week is another valid question altogether, but unrelated. But this seems to be a mistake as it seems odd that Pintero wouldn't know who's responsible despite mugging for the camera. Without any other explanation or dialogue, this is a plot error.

Brittle Fingers

He wants to know who gave this tape to Smith, who made a version of it that got in the hands of a lawyer. That's what he wants to know. He may or may not know who was actually filming, but he wants to know who it was that got it out of private hands and into the hands of Smith.

lionhead

Pintero's question "Who made the tape?" refers to the copy that Dean has, not the original which, as already pointed out, he was well aware of.

Corrected entry: In the taxi, the fake Brill brakes to avoid hitting the guy in the wheelchair but is immediately tail-ended by a another car. Instead of being hit by the taxi, the guy and his wheelchair disappear without trace.

Correction: This is because the man in the wheelchair has gone past the front of the car, hence the fake Brill's reaction - ie, he sighs with relief. Therefore, when the car hits him from behind, the man in the wheelchair is uninjured.

Corrected entry: At the beginning of the movie, when Will Smith comes into the conference room to find out about the mob/union situation, he is told that Larry Cash is in the hospital (unnamed). But then he calls his secretary in and asks her to send a case of Chianti to Larry Cash and tells her Larry is in St. Luke's.

Correction: St Luke's may simply be the nearest hospital. By being told Larry Cash was at "...the hospital", Dean may have assumed he meant St Lukes. He must have been right. No one corrected him.

Corrected entry: When Will Smith finds the lady dead in her apartment, he is wearing gloves in one shot and in the next shot they are gone and he's leaving fingerprints everywhere.

Correction: There is a clear shot showing Smith taking off his gloves just before he bends down to turn over the body. Stupid perhaps, but not a continuity error.

Other mistake: 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.

Christoph Galuschka

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

Suggested correction: Dean is only assuming the camera is in the smoke detector since that's one of the places he and Brill hid the other cameras. The shot of the smoke detector is just to show the audience what Dean is looking at, even though his guess is wrong.

More mistakes in Enemy of the State

Congressman Phillip Hammersley: Telecommunications Security and Privacy Act. Invasion of privacy is more like it. - You read the Post?"This bill is not the first step towards the surveillance society. It is the surveillance society."

More quotes from Enemy of the State

Trivia: Seth Green, who plays one of the main surveillance guys in the van, is not listed in the opening or closing credits. In addition, Tom Sizemore, who plays the mobster Paulie Pintero, goes uncredited.

More trivia for Enemy of the State

Question: What does the sequence with the fake Brill have to do with anything? I've watched this scene several times and can't find its significance in the film.

manthabeat

Chosen answer: The fake Brill is an undercover federal agent trying to find out what Will Smith knows about the video tape.

Mister Ed

Poor writing though as that character is never spoke of again.

More questions & answers from Enemy of the State

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