Corrected entry: When the AV-8B Harrier II fighter duo attacks the trucks on the bridge, they fire sidewinder missiles to destroy the bridge. Sidewinder missiles are not air-to-ground missiles and cannot be fired at ground targets as there is no heat source to lock onto. This task would have called for bombs or rockets.
Corrected entry: When Arnold is being followed by the bad guys and uses the cigarette-pack camera to watch them, the lens is toward the bottom of the pack as he holds it. However when he puts the pack on the sink in the bathroom later, although it's in an upside-down position compared to before, the feed in his sunglasses is still right-side up as before.
Correction: Considering the technology they used to put the camera in there, it is likely that the sunglasses can have the image flipped automatically when viewed, much the same way that camera phones flip the image when viewed from the other side.
Corrected entry: The 6 foot 2 Arnold manages to squeeze his steroid pumped body into a harrier jet, which is only mean to host people of horse jockey stature (around 5'8").
Correction: 10 years as a harrier plane captain and I've seen guys bigger than Arnold was for that movie fit comfortably in a harrier.
Corrected entry: A real Harrier jet can only hover for approx 30 seconds. It needs water 150 gallons to cool the engine. In the movie it hovers for a few minutes, which would be impossible because it would have run out of coolant.
Correction: The Harrier can actually hover easily for 5-6 minutes, even longer as long as engine temperatures are fine but aren't supposed to hover much longer than that. From there they can land or transition to conventional flight. The water is used to act as a cool charge to give the engine more power when in a hover but is not mandatory, and it is not used strictly as a coolant like radiator fluid.
Corrected entry: After Aziz has shot up the bathroom stalls, you can see the resultant bullet holes in the doors. While doing this he is standing at quite an oblique angle to the doors and as such you would expect to see elongated/oval shaped bullet holes in the doors from their angle of entry. instead you see the perfectly round holes produced by a real gun obviously being fired from an off-screen location at ninety degrees to the doors.
Corrected entry: The exterior shot, from behind the Harrier, towards the building shows that all the windows are mirrored glass. Harry would only have seen his reflection on the side of the building and couldn't have known where the terrorists were, or even if he knew which floor, whether there were any hostages or other innocent people inside.
Correction: Harry had a situation-report given to him by fellow agent Faisil, who was posing as part of the news crew inside the building. This included where all the hostages and terrorists were. Faisil was very clear on where all the hostages were. As for Harry knowing where the terrorists were, he didn't. That's why he (virtually) shot up the entire floor to make sure he got as many as possible.
Corrected entry: Opening shot of the lake shows the water as unfrozen. Then Arnold is cutting through the gate under a frozen lake. He then cuts through the ice with a knife and exits the frozen lake.
Correction: A) He is not cutting through the gate under a frozen lake, it's a much thinner canal next to the boat house (why would you have a gate in the middle of a lake? It's a canal for the boats). b) A canal may freeze much faster than a whole lake, there may be less current/waves on it. If you look how the surface of a major lake freezes, you'll see that the water surfaces in the harbors (behind the levies) freeze first, whilst the water surface in the actual lake is still unfrozen.
Corrected entry: When Arnie is breaking through the ice at the beginning of the film, it's obviously just wax. Watch the way it breaks when he's cutting the hole to crawl out of, and also how buoyant it is. Also, listen to the sound effects. It sounds like they didn't even bother covering up the wax sound with the sound of ice cracking.
Correction: Ice IS buoyant, that's a fact of physics. Plus, it doesn't always freeze solid. Some portions can be thinner than others, some can have air pockets in them, making it quite easy to break through.
Corrected entry: When Harry is being interrogated by Samir, he gets drugged with something he refers to as sodium amytal (amobarbital) which is a treatment for insomnia and not a truth agent as Harry refers to it as. (01:33:46)
Correction: To date, I don't believe there are any reliable "truth serums." Substances/barbituates used as so-called "truth serums" basically slow down messages to the brain, thereby (in theory) making it more difficult for some people to lie because lying requires thinking/ concentration. Sodium Amytal may still be referred to as a "truth serum", but is no longer used for this purpose. (Some people developed false memories). You are correct, however, that it may be used for insomnia because it is a sedative.
Corrected entry: When the bad guy is stuck on the missile on the rail of the Harrier, and Arnold shoots it, it carries the bad guy into the building and out the other side. Modern missiles accelerate at more than 2000 G's - the Sidewinder weighs less than 200 lbs, and thrust is more than 40,000. So he would have been fried by the backwash as it left without him. (02:11:55)
Correction: First, I think the numbers are a little bit off. According to http://www.easycalculation.com/unit-conversion/acceleration-converter.php, an acceleration of 2000G would indicate an airspeed of almost 44000 miles/h (or almost 71000 km/h), which is probably more than the explosion itself when the rocket hits. Second, the rocket is fired with a person weighing the same or more than the rocket itself hanging from it, which would severely reduce the acceleration (That the rocket would be able to steer and hit its target with all that extra weight is more improbable).
Corrected entry: After Arnold hands Helen the machine gun after they escape capture in the camp, Helen accidentally drops the gun, where-after, for a number of seconds, it shows a number of enemy terrorists being killed by the spray of the bullets from the gun bouncing down the stairway. One, no gun will normally fire without holding down the trigger, obviously Helen does not know how to set auto-fire [most machine-guns don't have it] so the sequence is incredibly unlikely to begin with. Two, that kind of machine gun will dump all of its ammo in about 2 seconds if it was stuck, they have this scene going on for 10 or fifteen seconds, an impossibility.
Correction: Whilst making the film the effects crew were having a hard time trying to rig the submachine gun [not a machine gun] to fire, in the end they did exactly what happens in the film - they simply dropped it down the stairs after hearing that particular weapon was known for misfiring. It worked, and that's what ended up on film. Also the scene appears in slow motion, which is why it appears to go on and on, if you watch the weapon it doesn't fire constantly, only when it hits the stairs and it only fires in small bursts.
Corrected entry: When Art Malik's character falls from the crane firing the AK47, he later picks it up off the Harrier and re-cocks the weapon and fires again. The rifle was already cocked and loaded when he fell off the crane.
Correction: This is irrelevant. By pulling back the cocking handle and re-cocking the weapon all he is doing is ejecting one round and re-chambering another from the magazine. Granted, this is a waste of a round, but wouldn't stop him from firing the weapon.
Corrected entry: Harry and his partner followed Simon after his lunch with Helen on Chinatown. The restaurant was pretty crowded, so how come they knew who to follow? Simon would not come out of the restaurant together with Helen, because he had a 'secret agent' role to play. He must have instructed her to go out a few minutes before or after him, so Arnie would have no way to know that he was the guy to follow. (00:52:30)
Correction: Simon wouldn't want to risk Helen following him, in case she found out what he really does, so he'd send her out first. But he wouldn't want to be sitting there for ages either. All Harry and Gib have to do is wait until she leaves, then look for a single man leaving within a few minutes. It's still something of a guess, but an educated one which, as we see, pays off.
Corrected entry: When Harry is holding Simon at the dam edge, the floor is dry. In the next shot of it where he admits he just sells cars the waterway is very wet.
Correction: Simon wets himself because of what's happening to him as we know he's not a secret agent, this happens again at the end of the film which is then a sort of in joke.
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the movie, when Arnold is running down the snow covered hill with the guys chasing him on skis, he shoots at them with a semi-automatic. He changes magazines once, but I counted 24 shots after that change, and there was no shot of him changing magazines again, nor any chance to do so. There was no extended magazine on the gun, so about the most rounds he could have fired (being liberal) would have been 19 shots. (00:13:00)
Correction: At most he shoots 19 times, maybe 18, after reloading. But on top of that, when we do see him change magazines, it takes him less than 2.5 seconds (including pulling it out of his jacket) and there's a part of the action where he's off camera for 3 seconds.
Corrected entry: When Harry goes into the shopping mall toilet, the two terrorists follow him in. They have no radio contact with their leader, yet minutes later the leader goes directly to the toilets. It's improbable that he'd know where Harry was. (00:32:10)
Correction: 'Improbable' is the key word there. And actually it makes perfect sense for the leader to check the toilets. After all, he's just thinking as Arnie would [and did] think.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Arnie is asking for the missing page in his wife's phone conversations, Arnie punches out the window of their car. In the next shot when they get in and drive away, the window shows no sign of being damaged (no fragments of glass etc.), nor does Tom's hair move in the subsequent wind that should be blowing through the broken window.
Correction: The window that was broken is the passenger side rear, not the front window next to Tom. In the next scene when they are driving away, you can see the broken glass window over Tom's shoulder.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the terrorist jumps the motorcycle from the hotel into the pool on the other building's rooftop, why didn't Tom Arnold and the rest of the law enforcement officers just arrest him when he exited the building on the ground floor? He had to leave that building at some point and it was right across the street from where they were.
Correction: There are many possibilities. They may not have known the terrorist had jumped to another building. There may simply not have been enough of them to secure all exits from the second building--he presumably did not just walk out the front door.
Corrected entry: When the Crimson Jihad is making its video while in the Florida Keys, the statement is made that "We will rain down fire on 1 U.S. city each week" unless their demands are met. The very next day, they are in Miami with the second nuke and claiming that they are all ready to die for their cause. Who would be left to 'rain down fire' if they all died in that building?
Correction: Quite a lot changes in between them making the video and the scenes in Miami - they've lost all the other nuclear weapons. As such, it really doesn't matter if all of them die, as they've got no other weapons to "rain down fire" with.
Corrected entry: During the stripdance scene in the hotel room, Tasker is using what looks a whole lot like a walkman to play the recording of a man talking. Watch as the first number of times he plays and stops the tape, he presses buttons along the face of the player. Then when he replays "Now lie on the bed, and close your eyes" he uses regular playback buttons that stick out on the side of the walkman. I've never seen a walkman with two sets of controls on the body of the machine.
Correction: They're spies with access to an array of gadgets, its entirely possible for them to have an electronic device that can play a recording.
Correction: Actually, Harry tells the Marines to use their Mavericks. The AGM-65 Maverick is an air-to-surface missile.