Character mistake: After Kimble jumps from the drain pipe over the waterfalls, the scene goes to Gerard standing in the pipe telling his crew to leave, then they all leave without picking up Gerard's gun that Kimble threw down next to him.
Continuity mistake: When the Marshals go to arrest Copeland, they are in Whiting, IN. When the Sheriff's car comes through, it is an Illinois State Police car.
Visible crew/equipment: The camera filming the wide shot of the press conference with the US Marshals and Chicago PD blends in with the rest of the camera crews there doing the conference. It is blatantly visible behind everyone asking questions. The angle from this camera is used at least twice. You can identify it by its film magazine. Almost all news organizations in the 1990s used video tape as opposed to film, so a film camera used during a press conference would and does stick out like a sore thumb.
Revealing mistake: Just after the opening murder scene, there's a shot of a Chicago Police van responding with blue lights flashing. If you look closely at the roof lights between the beacon on the right side of the roof you can see a sign "FILM2" stuck to the bar. (00:01:55)
Character mistake: The investigators say that the prints found in Sykes' apartment belong to Kimble after dusting for them, making it clear they didn't use any equipment for fingerprint analysis or testing. No forensic investigator would confirm who the prints belong to until they run a thorough analysis. It seems as if they were basing the fact that they belonged to Kimble because they traced the call to the apartment, rather than acknowledge that the prints could belong to someone else.
Continuity mistake: When Kimble leaves the hospital and the detectives arrive, it's dark outside. However, when they're interviewing the nurse, you can see it's daylight outside.
Factual error: In the train crash scene there are many mistakes. 2 locos are pulling a hand full of cars, a small switcher loco would actually have been used. Oil journal bearings that haven't been used for decades. A flat car carrying logs, but there is no logging in the Chicagoland area. The second loco for some reason derails. In reality the train would have just pushed the bus a few hundred feet with no derailment. The shed explodes. The 200 ton loco just slides along the soft ground.
Continuity mistake: When Kimble is on the moving train, Sykes mysteriously appears from a door when he wasn't there before. (02:00:00)
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?