Best action movie plot holes of all time

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Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones picture

Plot hole: When Amidala and some of the clone troopers get blown out of the ship chasing Dooku, later the trooper approaches Amidala and asks about making their way back to the front lines, but Amidala says they should go to the hangar to help Obi-Wan and Anakin. How did she know about the hangar, having left the ship quite some time before it arrived at the final destination? (02:05:50)

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Blue Thunder picture

Plot hole: Apart from the impressive pyrotechnics, what is the point of destroying the Blue Thunder helicopter? By far the most expensive, time consuming and technically complex part of producing any aircraft is the design and development phase - once the prototype is in the air production is relatively straightforward. The bad guys can make new Blue Thunders any time they like, and Murphy has destroyed the only evidence he has that there was a criminal conspiracy behind the whole programme - the 'videotape' he has of blurry, false coloured characters will convince nobody. Without the helicopter to back him up that tape is of no value to him.

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Suggested correction: The Blue Thunder is caught on camera by a TV helicopter during the aquaduct chase which is evidence it existed.

A helicopter is filmed on CCTV, yes, which gives no detail at all to its use, where it came from, or anything about the conspiracy behind it. The helicopter is proof of the sinister plot and Murphy just destroyed it.

Suggested correction: What you are forgetting is Murphy is already a criminal with or without the helicopter. He stole blue thunder, destroyed two police helicopters, a jet and a police car, endangered civilians lives and finally killed Cochrane. Even if he could prove the conspiracy, there was no way he was avoiding jail. When he walks off at the end, he knows the future is bleak for him.

Gavin Jackson

In no way does that correct the posting. Murphy would have an open-and-shut defence against all "criminal" charges if he could show he was acting against a much larger criminal conspiracy, which he now cannot do. Not only has he scuppered his own chances of defending himself he has handed the real criminals a Get Out Of Jail Free card. The posting is absolutely correct.

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Midnight Run picture

Plot hole: At the end of the film Mardukas reveals that he has been wearing a body belt packed with cash - "in the neighbourhood of three hundred thousand dollars" - ever since Jack detained him in New York. Are we to assume that Jack Walsh, an experienced, hard-bitten ex-police officer, now a bounty hunter who routinely chases down violent and armed bail absconders who would kill him without a second thought, didn't even perform a perfunctory search of Mardukas when he detained him? This man used to work for the Mafia! What if he was carrying a weapon? A body belt with three hundred one thousand dollar bills in it would be uncovered by even the most casual pat down.

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Suggested correction: He was using $1000 bills. That's 300 bills in the belt which spread evenly absolutely could have been missed near his waist as part of his clothing.

Rubbish. I specified $1,000 bills as that would be the smallest package he could have secreted about his person, and it would still be instantly detectable. If he used $100 bills the package would be ten times larger, and he would have to carry a rucksack under his shirt.

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Planet of the Apes picture

Plot hole: The "video history" of the crashed USAF ship makes it very clear that the planet is uninhabited when they "landed". I can understand how a race of apes develops - they had a bunch of them on board. I can understand how a race of humans develops - they are descendants of the original crew. What I don't understand is...where the heck did all the horses come from?

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Suggested correction: Humans refer to parts of their own planet as uninhabited even though they are crawling with animals - vast areas of the Arctic are "uninhabited" even though polar bears and seals are found there. Were we to find a planet with nothing but primitive horses on it, we would label it as uninhabited. Apes and humans came from the crashed spaceship, horses were always there.

Which still makes no sense whatsoever.

Charles Austin Miller

I agree with you Charles. Horses are native to Earth but, the Oberon lands on a planet light years from Earth so it's a big plot hole how horses from one planet could end up on another when the planet was not only uninhabited but, the Oberon was believed to be lost.

Again, the Oberon was a massive space station, genetically experimenting with many earthly lifeforms, including horses, apparently. The time/space-rift was very near Earth (Mark Wahlberg made the journey in about 25 seconds at the end of the film. Not years but seconds). The implication is that the Oberon passed through the rift, and much of the crew survived to continue their genetic research on what later became the Ape Planet. So, the Oberon initially arrived on a barren planet and introduced all of the biological and botanical species, including apes, horses, and everything else.

Charles Austin Miller

Suggested correction: According to the backstory, the space station Oberon was dedicated to genetic modification sciences. They were actually experimenting with animal genes in the safety of space (which kind of makes sense). Given that the Oberon was a truly gigantic space station, it's not too much of a speculation that they were experimenting on many different types of animals (not just apes). When the Oberon crashed on Ashlar, half its crew was killed, but half survived with a number of ship's systems still functional, and they continued their genetic research, possibly producing a number of Earthly species on the otherwise uninhabited planet.

Charles Austin Miller

I think this should've been posted as a question, rather than a plot hole.

Charles Austin Miller

That's just a wild guess. There hasn't been a single mention of horses on board the Oberon. Even if there were, why only horses?

lionhead

Wild guess? The Oberon was experimenting in genetic modification, which implies a broad range of research...and not just on great apes. The Oberon was gigantic enough to be an Ark.

Charles Austin Miller

So where are all the other animals?

lionhead

Exactly. Where are the birds, lions, lizards, etc?

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The Equalizer 2 picture

Plot hole: Robert first shoots the electrical transformer on the pole's top, then enters the bakery, slices the wheat sacks and uses electrical fans to create a dust cloud for a dust explosion. How are the electrical fans supposed to work after the electricity is cut?

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The Lost City of Z picture

Plot hole: Searching for the source of the river, the raft is going downstream. Return trip it's also downstream. Generally, no matter where they are going, the rafts keep floating downstream.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest picture Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest mistake picture

Plot hole: There are six metal bars mounted around the circumference of the water wheel's axle. In the wheel's interior, when Jack frees himself he lands on his feet, begins to run and promptly hits his head on one of those mounted axle bars, then falls out. Moments later, when Jack returns and runs in the wheel, he is shorter (way more than a foot) than all six of the mounted axle bars spinning with the water wheel, which would make that previous shot impossible, however humorous it is. (01:52:40 - 01:53:55)

Super Grover

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Spider-Man 3 picture

Plot hole: In this movie Goblin was able to sneak up on Peter. But in the previous movies Peter was able to sense danger from quite a distance away; Green Goblin from a few blocks and the train barricade from over a mile.

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Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade picture Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade mistake picture

Plot hole: When Indy is stepping on the letters at the end, trying to spell out God's name, he steps on J, incorrectly, causing it to collapse. When he falls through, however, he grabs onto another letter so as not to fall down. The letters he grabs onto and pulls himself up are an L and a Y, which are not in the word Iehova, so should have collapsed too. (01:46:20)

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The Core picture

Plot hole: How do they maintain communication between the ship at the centre of the earth and the surface? There's no wire, and radio waves can only travel any distance without obstacles, and the earth's crust would be a pretty hefty obstacle...

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Spider-Man 2 picture

Plot hole: Harry tells Doc Ock that in order to find Spider-Man he must find Peter first. Doc Ock finds Peter with Mary Jane in the cafe and throws a car through the window straight at them, then later throws Peter against a brick wall. Any normal person would've been killed instantly (or very badly injured), and Doc Ock doesn't yet know that Peter is Spider-Man. Given that Peter is his only lead on Spider-Man, it makes no sense that Doc Ock would try to kill him.

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Suggested correction: Doc Ock is being controlled by the arms. They aren't behaving rationally.

Creating a series of silly explanations for obvious plot holes never resolves them. These arms were not behaving irrationally. In many scenes they were shown to be very intelligent. A good example is the scene where they attack doctors who try to remove them from Doc Ock's body. Saying that they weren't behaving rationally is absurd.

He may not have been trying to kill Peter, he could've been trying to make more of a scene of his entry, so Peter would take him more seriously and tell him where Spider-Man was. He could've been thinking of it as a risk of killing Peter though, but his arms made him go crazy.

This is only a theory. Theories never resolve mistakes.

It's not a theory. When Otto is first giving his demonstration to everybody at his apartment, a woman asks if the advanced AI for the tentacles would make him susceptible to being controlled. Otto says that yes it would so he shows everybody the inhibitor chip that he designed so he would not fall under its control. After the inhibitor chip gets destroyed, it's seen that the tentacles have not only taken control of his mind by forcing him to commit crimes, but have slowly driven him insane.

This scene is much too confusing for many people. This entry is correct. This is a mistake.

If these tentacles wanted him to finish the experiment then they wouldn't make him kill the person who has valuable information for him.

The arms are influencing his thoughts but not controlling every part of him. Doc Ock still seems to have control when defending himself but they seem to work in tandem with Ock. The only time they work on their own is when he under anesthetic. As we don't see him before he throws the car, we can only speculate the arms were trying to hurt Peter by themselves.

Lummie

It's a cool scene regardless man.

Rob245

Killing Peter would probably send a message to Spider-Man as well, so Ock probably wasn't concerned about being gentle.

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For Your Eyes Only picture

Plot hole: Bond makes a huge tactical error after diving to the St. Georges. He knows the Russians and their operatives are after the ATAC. The ATAC itself is expendable to Britain, since it has a self-destruct mechanism that, under proper procedure, would have been set off when the ship sank. So why is Bond trying to retrieve it? Because he disarms the self-destruct, he actually allows Kristatos to get his hands on it, forcing Bond to track it down again and, to stop the Russians from getting it, HE DESTROYS IT! So why doesn't Bond, instead of disarming the self-destruct, set a timed charge or toss a grenade in the room to destroy the ATAC while it's at the bottom of the sea? The answer is, of course, that if Bond destroys the ATAC before the bad guys can get at it, the movie's over. Even so, at the end, when Bond finally does destroy the ATAC, he tells Gogol it's "detente. You don't have it. I don't have it." Clever line, but it reinforces the fact that the British don't need it. They can build another one.

Vader47000

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Now You See Me 2 picture

Plot hole: Prior to the final show, when the horsemen are performing separately at different locations in London. [Scene X] Jack is busy with his card swap trick. While others are doing their tricks too, [Scene Y] McKinney is believed to be tricked once again by his face sharing brother at another location... Dylan gets a call and then he calls everyone to wrap up and meet somewhere. [Scene Z] Jack also wraps up and leaves the place... OK. Later after the expose in final show McKinney tells the story about how Jack successfully hypnotized his brother [in the Scene Y]. How could Jack be at two different locations at the same time? He was performing somewhere else when he did hypnotism at another location and then wraps up his trick back where he started.

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Charlie's Angels picture

Plot hole: In the Redstar mainframe, we are told that the floor of the vault will trigger the alarm if it receives more than 0.25 seconds of contact (apparently even with the security checks). What would be the point of the bosses going through all of those security measures if they would just set the alarm off anyway? Surely once the girls have faked the fingerprint and retina scans, they don't then need to flip across the floor! (00:33:55)

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Bumblebee picture

Plot hole: How can Bumblebee and Optimus already have the car specs and colours before they leave Cybertron for the first time to come to earth? Optimus didn't have this when they came to earth in the first Transformers movie.

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Suggested correction: First of all, this might not be the same continuity as the older Transformers films. Second of all, the cars on Cybertron might be Cybertronian vehicles. Optimus scanned the semi in the first film so that he could be a different vehicle than he already was. There is no reason this could not have happened.

I'd like to add that we know for a fact that this is not the same continuity. It is a reboot. See the Wikipedia article.

FleetCommand

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Speed picture

Plot hole: 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.

GalahadFairlight

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Suggested correction: It is unlikely, but they could have transferred him a second time to another vehicle off-screen.

It could've happened during the scene where the older scared woman was trying to leave the bus, and the cops told her to "grab my hand." They KNOW the hostages leaving the bus risks the bomb going off, and they still tried to get that lady off. It's literally these cops' first day on the job.

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Skyscraper picture Video

Plot hole: The entire plot hinges on the villain's gang obtaining the tablet that allows admin access to the building's systems. However, it can only be unlocked via facial recognition and it is keyed only to Will Sawyer's face. In fact, when they finally do get it, Xia unlocks it by holding it up to Sawyer's face. So what was the point of trying to steal the backpack containing the tablet? Without Will to unlock it, the tablet is useless.

wizard_of_gore

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Battlefield Earth picture

Plot hole: The facilities at Ft. Hood have working electricity to power the simulators, projectors, etc. even though it's been 1000 years, with no logical reason for the Psychlos to have kept the facility maintained, and the fact that the Psychlos should by rights have leveled the place when they invaded 1000 years before. Even automatic backup generators would have no fuel after 1000 years dormancy except for a nuclear system, which would still have required regular maintenance over a 1000 year interval to maintain automatic functionality.

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Dracula Untold picture

Plot hole: When Vlad enters Mehmed's tent, the entire floor is covered in silver coins and Mehmed remarks on Vlad's weakness to it. There's no way that Mehmed could have known about Vlad being a vampire or about his weakness to silver, as Vlad had killed every Turk after becoming a vampire, so nobody would be alive to tell him. Even the Turk found on the battlefield in the morning lived long enough only to deliver Vlad's message, but died immediately after that.

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Jurassic Park III picture

Plot hole: The spinosaurus manages to smash through a metal reinforced wall designed to stop dinosaurs getting past it without too much effort, yet it can't get through a wooden gate secured by some metal bars. It makes no sense.

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Suggested correction: The Spinosaurus used its full body force to smash the fence. The gate, being a smaller target, was too small for the Spinosaurus to use its full body force.

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