Mission: Impossible 3
Mission: Impossible 3 mistake picture

Deliberate mistake: Bare shoulders are forbidden in the Vatican premises, so the sexy dresses in the party would not be allowed.

Sacha

Factual error: When Tom Cruise is going to defibrillate Keri Russell to disarm the bomb in her head, no defibrillator takes 30 seconds to charge to 150 joules. Most go to 360 joules and if they are not charged in 10 seconds the batteries are depleted enough that they won't charge at all.

Continuity mistake: When Ethan is running through the Shanghai streets, he passes a man holding a vase. In the immediately following wide angle the man has vanished.

Sacha

Visible crew/equipment: Just after Owen Davian is run over by the truck in Shanghai, Ethan chases the rabbit's foot down the street. There is a high angle street scene of Ethan running across the road. A cameraman is visible on the footpath following Ethan. Also, the traffic is going against the road markings. (01:26:35)

Revealing mistake: In the helicopter chase Ethan and Lindsey (and the defibrillator) are just sitting on the floor of the helicopter while it is doing very radical moves. They would have been thrown around.

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: When the sewer lid is removed, it is pushed to the right (compared to the location of the car) but when it is pulled back, it lies behind the hole (again compared to the location of the car).

Jacob La Cour

Continuity mistake: During the bridge scene, soldiers approach the armoured vehicle to spray it with orange gel. As they approach, the vehicle has a triangular reflector on the rear side. In the shot five seconds later showing the orange gel being sprayed, the rear reflector is circular. (01:03:40)

Continuity mistake: Towards the end of the film, after Tom has been electrocuted to destroy the bomb implanted into his skull, we see the female lead trying to restart his heart, each time they show his eyes, they are closed or open in different shots, and if they are closed, you can see his eyeball moving underneath the eyelid.

Steve Leadbeatter 2822

Mission: Impossible 3 mistake picture

Continuity mistake: In the scene in Berlin, the female member of the IMF team starts with no special glasses/goggles, then has them up on her head, then, just before the shooting begins, she puts them over her eyes, but later, while the shooting is still going on, they are back up on top of her head. Then they completely disappear. (00:17:50)

Continuity mistake: When Ethan and the team are being attacked on the bridge, Ethan's back left jean pocket is ripped. However, when Ethan is recovering from almost falling off of the bridge, his pocket is intact.

BigOLB

Continuity mistake: When Ethan Hunt has replaced Damion's character, in the bathroom, the white handkerchief in his hand disappears and reappears in sequential shots, as he points two fingers to his bodyguard.

Factual error: The walls of the Vatican are guarded by humans not cameras.

Continuity mistake: After the fight on the bridge Ethan drives away in the Mercedes. But the road was blocked by the yellow truck. And if the Mercedes had been in front of the yellow truck in the first place, its driver would probably have driven away instead of leaving his car.

Jacob La Cour

Factual error: When Ethan hangs Davian from the plane's floor hatch, Davian's head is already all the way out of the plane with the air outside blowing at him. Yet when Ethan pulls him up we find that Davian overheard Ethan's name. With the fast wind blowing at his ears he could never hear anything but a deafening roar, making Ving Rhames voice inaudible even if he were screaming.

Mission: Impossible 3 mistake picture

Continuity mistake: At the start as Ethan is handcuffed to the chair, the drop of blood underneath his nose constantly changes in size depending on the camera angle. This is also true when we cut back to that scene later in the film. (00:00:45)

Scrappy

Continuity mistake: Near the end of the movie, when Tom Cruise is running through the narrow streets in China, while on the phone with the guy from IMF, he is nearly struck by a truck coming very quickly from an adjacent street. In the next shot, they show the road from which the truck had just come. The thing is, it's filled with people, none looking like a large truck just went barreling by. The truck was going at too high a rate of speed to have come from the heavily populated street.

Continuity mistake: When Ethan - after getting the rabbit's foot - calls Musgrave, his location is shown on a map. He is in the northern part of Shanghai, quite some distance from Pudong, the area south of the river, where the high rise buildings are. However in the next clip, he drives down the on-ramp to The Bund, which is the street right next to the river, opposite Pudong. So he's been driving in circles - and extremely fast.

Jacob La Cour

Visible crew/equipment: When Zhen arrives at the courtyard in the Vatican, a gentleman opens the car door. A cameraman and crew member are visible reflected in the door. (00:44:35)

More quotes from Mission: Impossible 3

Trivia: The scene in which Julia brings Ethan back to life is copied almost identically from the scene in "Lost" (Director JJ Abrams' hit TV show) where Charlie is brought back to life. Incidentally, you can hear the "Lost" music played throughout the show, most noticeable when Davian is about to pick up the gun to kill Julia.

More trivia for Mission: Impossible 3

Question: What is the Rabbit Foot? It was never really explained in the movie or did I miss something?

Answer: It's never explained. This is what's known in the film industry as a McGuffin, a term popularised by Alfred Hitchcock, which is an item that's crucial to the plot, but the exact nature of which is never revealed because it actually doesn't matter in the slightest.

Tailkinker

More questions & answers from Mission: Impossible 3

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