Harry's limp fluctuates between left and right leg.
When Payne leaves Jack behind and takes Annie down to the subway station, he taunts Jack with the detonator. But from then up until Payne handcuffs Annie in the car, no one is holding the detonator. It is nowhere in sight.
At the beginning of the movie we see Keanu Reeves taking Jeff Daniels "out of the equation" by shooting him in the leg. We realize it's a serious injury as he requires the use of a cane when receiving his medal. However later on in the movie when they move in on Dennis Hopper's home, which takes place the next day, Daniels is part of the assault team and has no cane, no limp and is obviously very mobile.
In the last 20 minutes of the movie when Howard Payne is on the train and offers Jack some money, Howard opens the money bag and gets sprayed with purple paint. When Howard climbs on top of the train to fight Jack, all of the paint is gone.
In one scene where Dennis Hopper is holding the phone with one hand, he very obvious snaps with the other one just a little bit off camera. The hand holding the phone has all of the fingers, but the off-camera one is missing a thumb. How can you snap without a thumb?
On the train, the console is malfuntioning but Jack speeds the train up by shifting the lever forward so why not pull the lever back which would slow the train down.
Harry's team enters the bombers residence without checking for explosives first.
All trains have a "dead man's switch", which activates if the driver no longer has pressure on it. This is a safety device which stops the train if a driver is incapacitated for any reason. Therefore, when the driver in the film is shot in the back, the train would simply coast to a stop.
A bus jumping a gap in an unfinished freeway would nosedive, not jump up and soar across to the other side. Director Jan de Bont has admitted getting around this by having the bus drive up a ramp.
Elevators' emergency brakes must engage faster than that, otherwise they would be useless if the car fell when nearer the base of the shaft.
Payne hears a news reporter on television saying a police officer boarded the bus by jumping onto it from a moving vehicle and assumes it must have been Jack. It is later revealed that Payne has a video camera inside the bus and can see everyone aboard. So he should have seen Jack through the video camera and already known he was aboard the bus.
Payne's "assumption" was likely a ruse as he didn't want Jack to know about the camera.
What in the world could possibly be gained by Jack completely covering Annie as she was jumping the bus over the gap in the freeway - his additional weight will help her to stay down in her seat on impact and thus accelerate again as quickly as possible.
After the discovery of the bomber's identity and place of residence. Jack listens as his partner gives the details then after they hang up the phone, Jack says to himself, "Come on Henry, save my ass," vs "Come on Harry..." The partner's name is Harry, not Henry.
Jack does not say "Henry", he says "Harry". His pronunciation is close to "Herry" or "Hairy".
Jack does not say "Henry", he says "Harry". His pronunciation is close to "Herry" or "Hairy".
Jack's car appears to have a Michigan license plate, but it's really an old-fashioned California plate.
During the airport segment Jack rides the towed dolly under the bus and there is significant debris encountered by the bus. In an airport this is known as "FOD" (Foreign Object Debris). FOD is fatal to aircraft as it could easily be sucked in to a jet engine and cause catastrophic damage. There is no way it would be left on any area of the airport runway, tarmac, or taxiway.
The buses tyres are punctured on a spike strip when the bus enters the airport and are deflating/delaminating slowly while the bus is driving around the runways. It is highly likely that the FOD on the tarmac are fragments of rubber that have come off the buses tyres.
The buses tyres are punctured on a spike strip when the bus enters the airport and are deflating/delaminating slowly while the bus is driving around the runways. It is highly likely that the FOD on the tarmac are fragments of rubber that have come off the buses tyres.
Just before the bus jumps the gap, Jack speeds it up with his foot. When it shows the bus going faster, the footage has simply been sped up. Look at the truck with the cops on in the background.
At the very end of the movie you can clearly see that the train station the train crashed through is fake. The entire Train station is gone and there is nothing but a wall standing in the middle of the street.
When Jack and Annie slide out from under the bus and into the dirt, we can see the stuntman's wedding ring. Jack is not wearing a ring.
When the bus is landing after jumping over the gap in the freeway, you can see that it is completely empty with nobody on board.
The bus, upon making contact with the cargo plane at the airport, blows up from inside the bus and then spreads to the plane; the bomb was placed under the bus and would have obliterated the bus's chassis completely, yet the bottom half of the bus remains essentially intact.
During some scenes where bus is on city streets having driven off of the freeway, it's clear the bus is travelling far less than 50 mph which would set off bomb destroying the bus and all its passengers.
When Payne loses his head no blood spews out of him and all over Jack.
When Stephens falls off the platform connecting to the airport bus, no one bothers to yell at the driver to stop or at least slow down.
It can be seen in one (maybe more) of the scenes where the bus needs to go fast for a turn that in actuality they are using sped up photography (as done in T2 during one of the chase scenes) to give the illusion of going faster, when in actuality they are not.
The impact of the falling elevator to the bottom floor causes the passengers rescued from it to run away in fear. However, those passengers were 20 floors up, so the sound of the falling elevator hitting the bottom that far below would at best have been a faint noise.
Several times throughout the film characters say things when their lips do not move. For example, when Jack is under the bus defusing the bomb, a piece of rubber runs up under his cart. Jack says, "Fuck me!" but his lips do not move.
When Payne says to Jack, "Ok, but I want you back *real fast*," what he is actually saying is, "I want you back in 10 minutes." The scene was dubbed to give Jack a little more leeway - he is obviously gone longer than the allotted 10 minutes.
As Jack is driving his truck up the freeway on ramp, the camera switches to a side on view. Jack sounds his horn several times, but both of his hands remain on the steering wheel. In previous/subsequent shots, when Jack sounds the horn, his hands leave the wheel and press the horn ring inside the steering wheel.
Extra beep of elevator passing a floor.
Soon after Annie takes the wheel from Sam she asks, "is there a plan?" Jack replies, "Just keep it above 50." We hear her voice say, "good plan." but her lips don't move.
After the first bus blows up, Jack is on the phone with the bomber. The bomber gives Jack a deadline of 11am, after which Jack looks at his watch. The time on Jack's watch shows 8:05, but that's not the time of day. Above the numbers on the watch are the letters AL, which means it's on the Alarm setting. 8:05 is the time the watch alarm was set for, not the time of day.
When McMahon is giving Jack directions to the vacant 105 freeway, a well-dressed crew member wearing sunglasses and a big grin is visible sitting in the aisle of the bus.
When Jack is running alongside the bus, a camera can be seen in the door.
When the bus makes the hard right and is only on its left wheels you can clearly see the lift beneath the bus, painted black. You can see it in both shots of the leaning bus.
The chain pulling the first exploding bus is clearly visible.
Shortly after Annie takes control of the bus, if you look out the window in the background when Jack asks her if she can handle it, we can see the bus passing the same truck accident that Jack parked his car in front of when he first spotted the bus.
When the bus collides with the plane and explodes, there are mountains close behind in the background and the airport seems to be right at the foot of the mountains. This is obviously not LAX. While there are mountains surrounding LA, they are nowhere near that close to LAX. They are many miles from LAX, with miles of LA's urban sprawl in between. The scene was actually filmed at Mojave Airport in the desert, the so-called "airplane boneyard" - a storage location for retired commercial airliners and other planes, due to the vast area and dry desert conditions.
When on the city streets the TV news reports that the bus is headed South on Western. But after it hits the stroller of cans the bus is seen heading towards Rimpau, which is a North/South street. So the bus is either going East or West, but definitely not North/South.
Howard Payne's house is located in Sun Valley. The house the police drive up to is overlooking LAX as you can see the historic Theme Building in the background, which is about 30 miles away.
When Howard Payne gives the drop point as Pershing Square, he looks out the window and says "there's a garbage can on the northeast corner." The sun is to the left and the shadows from the buildings are long. This, along with the location of the can would imply that the sun is virtually due north, which is impossible for L.A.
When they get Sam the driver off the bus and onto the trailer, it's stressed how important it is to get him to hospital, but in all subsequent scenes, the trailer never leaves the side of the bus and no one takes Sam off.
If Jack can speed the train up, why does he not try to slow it down? Even if it can't be stopped completely, using the speed lever to reduce it to the minimum possible would be a sensible course of action. There is nothing to suggest he wouldn't be able to do this as he is able to increase the speed without any trouble. If there was something to show that slowing down the train would be unworkable it would make sense, but seems to more serve as a plot device.
SPOILER:After the bus explodes Jack assumes that Payne doesn't know about it because of the tape running on the high jacked signal to his hideout. So none of the numerous media outlets Payne was watching as well reported that there was a huge explosion at the airport? Even with the news choppers grounded the explosion was so massive that it would have been visible to more than just the one news crew the police used to find the signal.
After Dennis Hopper boards the train with Sandra Bullock he allows a couple to leave, then tell s the driver to start the train and then shoots him along with destroying most of the console. How had his character then planned to get off a moving subway train which even at normal speed would have meant serious injury if he had thought about jumping off for someone who meticulously plans everything rather an oversight really.
There is supposedly a spy cam already in place through which Howard, the villain, is monitoring the activity on the bus and even blows up the footstand when the lady tries to get off. But when the passengers go and help Jack get back into the bus from under it after checking out the bomb and all the hullabaloo goes on to save him, Howard is apparently unaware of all the proceedings and doesn't blow up the bus.
When Jack is talking to Howard Payne at the pay phone, the boom mic is reflected in the phone in several shots.
During the medal awarding ceremony, the MC states that the only life taken by the terrorist's bomb was his own. While this is technically accurate, it disregards the death of the guard Payne stabs in the head before the first elevator bomb goes off.
When Helen tries to get off the bus, and Annie starts yelling at her not to, Jack comes into the shot and looks at Helen from behind. It then cuts to Payne who arms the bomb under the stairs. Jack knows Payne will detonate the bus if any passengers get off, but he does nothing to stop Helen from doing so, even though he had time to. Payne then sets off the bomb under the stairs killing Helen in the process.
Additionally, the police on the flatbed are actively encouraging Helen to step off the bus, even though Jack explicitly told them about Payne's "no one gets off" rule moments prior.
Additionally, the police on the flatbed are actively encouraging Helen to step off the bus, even though Jack explicitly told them about Payne's "no one gets off" rule moments prior.
The SWAT team members are all without any helmets when they respond to the elevator-hostage crisis.
When Payne is giving Jack the rules for the bus, Jack drops the phone before Payne finishes telling him the intersection where the bus is.
During the medal ceremony, Harry is addressed as 'Officer' and wears the rank insignia of a Police Officer III (2 chevrons), but later Jack tells the Jaguar driver to call a number and ask for 'Detective Harry Temple'. Detective is a higher rank than Officer in the LAPD.