Continuity mistake: The green Alfa in the opening minutes has its side, and mirror, wiped out by a lorry. For the next 5 minutes it then drives around in perfect condition. (00:05:43)
Factual error: The vents that Hunt and his sidekick crawl down at CIA Headquarters are standard galvanized steel box vents; they are very common in the building trade. Try walking or crawling down one - you'll make a noise like the sky is falling down. People will be able to hear you for miles. Every person in that building would know somebody crawling about in the vent system. (This error applies to dozens of films, not only this one).
Factual error: At the end of the film Rainwood has established his innocence of the drug charges and is happily back at work as a senior mechanic for a large airline. However, part of the sentencing and plea bargain protocols at his arraignment is his previous conviction on a lesser drug charge years before. It goes without saying that he did not advise his employers of this when he started work for them - no airline in the world (even pre 9/11) would hire someone with a drug conviction on their record! Now this is out in the open the airline knows that Rainwood is a convicted drug user (on the lesser, legitimate charge) and that he lied on his original job application. They wouldn't hire him again to sweep the floors.
Factual error: Near the end of the film, Knox is flying a Huey helicopter, and the Angels hitch a ride by shooting it with a speargun and dangling on the line behind it. Suddenly adding about 200kg to a Huey in flight like that is going to cause all sorts of problems with the trim and airspeed of the aircraft. The pilot would know immediately that something was wrong. (01:23:20)
Suggested correction: Knox wasn't a trained pilot. Either he had no clue to what was going on, or he thought something may have been wrong, but didn't know what to do about it.
Taking off and landing a helicopter are by far the most intense and difficult part of a pilot's training. Seriously, 99% of learning to fly is learning how to land and take off. If the pilot is skilled enough to take off in a Huey he is easily skilled enough to notice a massive additional drag on his helicopter due to the additional weight of the angels and the air resistance put up by such a bulky protrusion on his aircraft. If he isn't skilled enough to notice that, he isn't skilled enough to take off in the first place.
Continuity mistake: When Sam is in his bedroom, after he finds the Cube sliver it falls and dramatically burns a hole through the floor into the kitchen. But Sam's bedroom is over the living room (there is nothing on the ground floor below Sam's elevated bathroom, and in the first movie Jazz hides in this open space), and the kitchen is actually located between the den and dining room, at the other end of the house. If they were to follow the actual floor plan of the house, the Cube sliver would have landed in the area of the piano in the living room, but where would the fun have been in that? (00:12:30)
Factual error: Why is Hilts not wearing a uniform? A serving officer captured behind enemy lines in civilian clothing risked being shot as a spy. If a prisoner's uniform was too worn or damaged to wear, it was routine for the German authorities to replace it - a P.O.W. in civilian clothes is an obvious escape risk. He is wearing a pair of tan chinos, a cut off sloppy Joe sweatshirt, both ridiculously anachronistic - Sixties hipster fashions - and nowhere even close to a World War 2 uniform. He is also wearing Army Type III Service boots - something that would never have been issued to a fighter pilot.
Suggested correction: Hilts was a POW for some years, so his current clothing would not reflect what he wore when captured, so he would not be considered a spy. After multiple escape attempts, his original uniform was probably ruined. POWs would have traded and swapped clothes. If prisoners died at the camp, their uniforms would be repurposed, regardless of branch or division. The Geneva Convention required that POWs receive shelter, food, clothing, medical care, etc. The Red Cross also delivered care packages to POW camps with food, miscellaneous apparel, and other essentials. Sweatshirts have existed since the 1920s and changed little. 1940s sweatshirts were similar to 1960s styles. Chino pants have been around since the late 19th century and were used for U.S. military uniforms.
And none of them would have been available to a prisoner in a German POW camp in Poland in the mid 1940s. Not one single item of hipster fashion would have found its way into the camp. Even if it did, do you really think the German authorities would allow a prisoner to lounge about in civilian clothing? Talk about an escape risk.
Other than the sweatshirt, Hilts is wearing military clothing - a leather bomber jacket and U.S. Air Force khaki trousers. So not "hipster" civilian clothing. The sweatshirt could just be something he had or acquired at another camp and appears to be his only shirt. He and two other POWs are the only Americans, so their uniforms are different. There's no way to say definitively what Hilts and other POWs would be allowed to wear. That was up to the camp commandant, who was shown as being rather disdainful about Hitler and his minions.
Audio problem: When Luke says, "Now all we gotta do is find this Yoda, if he even exists," if you look closely, his mouth never moves.
Continuity mistake: In the final fight scene on the plane between Jinx and Agent Frost, Jinx is slashed across her stomach, drawing blood. In a later scene, when Jinx and 007 are pouring diamonds over one another in the hut on the cliff, her stomach is unblemished. (02:02:25)
Plot hole: The convicts remove the radar transponder from the Conair aircraft and put it aboard a tour plane to distract their pursuers. That won't work. By law the tour plane will have a working radar transponder of its own, and two working transponders that close together will show up on radar as a collision. Air traffic controllers would immediately alert emergency services who would, obviously, wonder how two aircraft that had collided had managed to stay in the air. Nobody disconnects the first transponder - Pinball carelessly tosses the second transponder under the rear seat of the aircraft (the implication being that it continues to operate, perhaps on backup battery power). He doesn't disconnect the original transponder either - Swamp Thing, a skilled pilot, does that. There is no time for him to do any of this before he is stopped by the female security guard anyway.
Factual error: It is impossible for a stream of burning jet fuel to follow a plane through snow and catch up. Not only is jet fuel extremely hard to ignite, almost as soon as the plane was off the ground the fuel stream would be too dispersed for the flame to climb up into the tank, and even if not it wouldn't burn fast enough to catch the plane.
Continuity mistake: After chasing down Sully, the yellow Porsche is totally wrecked on the left side, until Arnie drives it away, and it's fine. Later, when Arnie and Cindy arrive at the hotel, the car is wrecked again. (00:39:50)
Factual error: While handling the ignition coil cable to the distributor cap, Joe Pesci tells De Niro that the timing chain needs adjustment in his truck. A truck of that year with an inline Chevy motor would not have a timing chain at all, instead this truck would be equipped with a direct drive timing gear. Even if it had a timing chain, it would be behind the water pump and a cover. It would have been a several hour job to replace, not possible to adjust it.
Continuity mistake: Right before they rob the police car, a Boeing 747 (four engines) is seen in shots of the plane coming into land. When the plane is shown from behind, it is a Boeing 767, with only two engines and fewer main landing gears. (00:30:10)
Suggested correction: It's for effect to show they were hanging out around the airport for more than a bit.
There's no evidence this was meant to be a montage scene of various planes. The cuts they did have in the first angle were of the same plane getting closer to build suspense. Same for the other angle. Plus, there's no scenes or shots of "them" waiting.
Visible crew/equipment: When Melissa dodges the truck that has fallen from sky and Dusty rushes to open a door and help Melissa get out of the truck, the reflection of a camera is seen in the bottom right corner of the truck window. As they move out and pan to the right, you can see a reflection of the same camera and cameraman at the bottom right corner of the truck door as they move away. (00:33:50)
Factual error: In the scene when Will is opening the drawer of films from the Leeds home, there is clearly a copy of Mrs. Doubtfire in the left column of tapes. How can that be? Red Dragon is clearly set "several years" after 1980, as the caption says, but before the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, but "Mrs. Doubtfire" came out in 1993.
Factual error: Trevor - a Professor of Geology - boasts about having an article published in Scientific American, and that is not something any scientist would do. Scientific American is looked upon with slight disdain by the scientific community, considered to be a populist crowd pleaser. It is not even peer reviewed. Considering that he has just turned the geological and archaeological worlds on their heads he would have been better off publishing in Journal of Geological Research or Geology, both prestigious professional journals.
Factual error: The movie starts in 1985, jumps '5 years later' and then back to Sasha Luss, then '3 years earlier'. So, in her crusty apartment in an impoverished neighbourhood of 1987 Soviet Russia, Anna is filling a form on her notebook-style laptop, too modern for the era. It looks like a NEC UltraLite (considered the first notebook style laptop) which didn't even come out until 1989, let alone the likelihood of someone in the USSR having one.
Plot hole: If Bradley Cooper was able to "quintuple" his money every day in the market as he claims to have done, he would have been able to earn the $100k he borrowed from a loan shark within a few days, starting from $800. Alternatively, he is shown in one scene winning a pot in poker where he could presumably also make a large amount of "seed" money from gambling. There was no need to borrow such a small sum of money from a loan shark, making the entire sub-plot unnecessary.
Suggested correction: The main character says he did quintuple his money four days in a row, not that he could continue to do so. "Presumably" he could do anything, like robbing a bank. Gambling is not a secure source of income, even with knowledge of the odds and every tell, he could also lose a lot of money.
He takes the seed money and then goes on to make a couple million with it on the stock market. There's really no reason he couldn't have just done that with the $800 seed money (also what the hell happened to that $10-20k stack of cash he took from Vernon's apartment? Somehow that was dwindled down to only $800?). The time constraint was totally artificial. He didn't need to conquer the world in 2 months except for the needs of the plot.
Character mistake: After Pookie is killed (with his eyes open) and the bomb is strapped to him, he blinks his eyes.
Visible crew/equipment: When Henry helps pull Mark onto the treehouse at the beginning of the film, if you look very closely to the left you can just make out a crew member dressed in black helping him on to the platform. The crew member then ducks back under the platform.
Suggested correction: Even today in 2023 felony convictions might not show up on a background check. Not all information has been uploaded to the internet yet. It was extremely easy in the 1980's for a conviction to be missed by a background check especially if there was no prison time served or it occurred in a rural county or town.
He just got out of prison and establishing his innocence involved the violent deaths of at least two people. Do you not think that his employers just might have followed his story? He'd be all over the news media. The idea that not one person would have followed up on his criminal history is beyond absurd - we are talking about a safety critical job that involves the safety of hundreds of people.