The Fugitive

Continuity mistake: Kimble dyes his hair very dark to escape detection and dyed hair fades over time. For the rest of the movie his hair noticeably goes from darker shades to lighter shades and back again showing that the scenes were shot non-sequentially on different days with a fair amount of time in between.

Other mistake: When Kimble takes the elevator to the conference to confront Dr. Nichols, he presses a button, but the one beside it is the one that actually lights up. In this particular elevator, the button he pressed is the one that should have lit up.

Character mistake: Kimble has just finished talking on the phone with his lawyer when the cops hear the noise in the background. They figure out the sound is that of an El-Train. They then start to list the different places that have an El. One of the cities they name is Milwaukee - there has never been an El-Train there.

Continuity mistake: During the bus accident, Richard Kimble is handcuffed. When the bus is falling, you can see that he has no handcuffs on, but then when he asks the guard to uncuff him again, he has them back on. (00:16:20)

Continuity mistake: After Richard Kimble first escapes they say he is near Route 15 and Interstate 57 heading towards Berkeley Dam. All these places exist, but Barkley Dam (Kentucky) is around a hundred miles away from these two roads (Illinois), and besides, Berkeley Dam looks nothing like what they show in the movie.

Continuity mistake: When the bus full of prisoners rolls down the embankment, it finishes up lying parallel to the train track. Yet in the next scene, the bus is clearly lying across the train track.

The Fugitive mistake picture

Continuity mistake: When Kimble goes back to the hospital as a janitor to check the hospital computer, the lady working in the lab is wearing two different dresses. (01:05:15)

Other mistake: When Harrison Ford is being chased in an ambulance by the police, there is a shot of police cars heading towards the waterfalls in the background. If you look closely, the water is not moving. (00:33:15)

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

Suggested correction: The water IS moving, you just need to look closely.

Other mistake: When Dr. Nichols hits Dr. Kimble with a chair, look carefully. As Dr. Nichols swings the chair, it starts falling apart before it even makes contact with Harrison.

Visible crew/equipment: During the chase scene in the access tunnels under the dam, there are several shots where the camera is in front of Harrison Ford moving backwards, showing him as he runs from Tommy Lee Jones. You can see the tracks that the camera dolly is riding on.

Audio problem: If you listen carefully to the conversation Kimble has with his lawyer, he says "St. Louis" differently in the live version and the police recording, indicating the crew may have used two different recordings.

Other mistake: After Kimble has been rescued from the train wreck and unchained, he escapes, running alongside a body of water. As Gerard announces to the other officers that there's a fugitive on the loose and gives instructions, Kimble is seen running again, in a replay of the earlier shot. Not only are all the same landmarks in place, but at the end of both sequences, he moves his arm to shake off a branch that's snagged him.

Continuity mistake: When Kimble is calling his lawyer close to the EL-train, he says something and then you hear the "clang" from the train's bell. You only hear it once. However, when the police records the call and plays it, the clang sounds almost constantly during the conversation.

Sacha

Audio problem: When the cops are monitoring Kimble's phone call to his lawyer, Gerrard says, "That's a guy on a PA in the background", or something similar. During the actual phone call that Kimble makes, their is no PA audible in the scene at all.

Continuity mistake: When Richard Kimble and the one armed man are fighting in the train, it shows from the outside of the train the one armed man stumbling backward. It shows his "prosthetic" hand grabbing for the pole.

The Fugitive mistake picture

Visible crew/equipment: After Sykes shoots the Transit Cop on the "L" Richard pulls the emergency brake, and in the following shot facing Richard as the train screeches in flashes of darkness, the reflection of a crew member quickly becomes visible on the glass window beside Richard. (01:47:45)

Super Grover

The Fugitive mistake picture

Continuity mistake: Kimble dives from the top of the dam when Gerard traps him in the tunnel. But in wide shots of Kimble falling, there's no tunnel above the dam. (The tunnel scenes were shot in Chicago, but the location sequences were done at Cheoah Dam in North Carolina - which has no tunnels. The end of the tunnel from which Harrison Ford supposedly jumped was built on the back of a large flatbed truck which was driven out on the top of the dam for the scene).

Jean G

Continuity mistake: When Kimble is fighting the one-armed man on the train, the one-armed man shoots the metro-cop, then he and Kimble fight some more. Kimble knocks him out with his gun (silver). He goes to check on the cop, sees he's dead so he takes his cuffs and gun (black). He cuffs the one-armed man to the rail puts his gun (silver) into his right pocket, and the cops gun (black) into his left pocket, and then makes his escape. Later on, he dumps the guns into a mailbox, but he pulls the silver gun out of his left pocket, and the black gun out of his right pocket. The guns changed pockets before he dumped them.

Continuity mistake: Kimble runs out the Grand Ballroom and ends up in the Presidential Suite in another fight. The doors he goes through out of the Ballroom actually lead into the Foyer for the Continental Ballroom, both of which are on the second floor. That Presidential Suite is on the 27th Floor.

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Trivia: When "Richard" starts to limp it wasn't planned, Harrison actually hurt a ligament in his knee shooting a promo for the movie, a promo that wasn't even part of the movie. He refused to receive treatment until filming was finished and ended up needing surgery.

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Question: Towards the end, before the confrontation with Kimble and Nicholls, the guy who was tracing Kimble's phone records tells the Marshalls that Kimble telephoned Sykes on the night of his wife's murder. But obviously it wasn't Kimble calling Sykes, it was Sykes using Kimble's phone. But why would Sykes be calling himself?

jenn_s_h85

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?

Answer: This is more of a question really. What kind of defense attorney did this high dollar, Dr. Kimble hire who do not show their defendant pictures of the one-armed men the police question? How do his attorneys not ask him "OK, which of these one-armed men did you fight with in your house?"

The prosecution is not required to inform the defense of every person the police interview or question. They are only required to give the defense whatever evidence they have against the accused. Simply questioning someone in a perceived dead only counts as evidence against the accused if the prosecutor mentions it in court. If the prosecutor were to say "We interviewed a one-armed man named Sykes and he says he doesn't know you", then Kimble's defense would be required to be given access to Sykes. We can assume this never happened.

BaconIsMyBFF

The Chicago police DID question Sykes after the Kimble murder. Review the scene where Sykes returns to his apartment after Kimble has been there. Girard starts asking Sykes questions, at first Sykes says he doesn't know anything about Kimble but then "remembers" that he had been interviewed by the police right after the Kimble murder. However, Sykes says that he gave the police an alibi, with 15 people supposedly confirming that Sykes was on a business trip and not in Chicago. The movie then implies that Sykes had been a Chicago cop and lost his arm "in the line of duty." Remember that the Chicago police focused on Kimble pretty quickly. Their investigators may have interviewed Sykes, but they likely didn't even come close to considering him as a potential murderer. Even with Sykes likely matching Kimble's description of the one-armed man, the police likely saw Sykes as a former cop... A former cop who had an alibi confirmed by 15 people. As I understand it, prosecutors don't have to tell defense attorneys about everyone that the cops question. They only have to tell the defense about potential witnesses that might be called in connection to the criminal trial. In this scenario, Sykes wouldn't have been part of the criminal trial (Again, supposedly on a business trip confirmed by 15 people on the night of the murder) and thus Kimble and his lawyers would never have known about his existence.

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