Corrected entry: In the scene where John McClane and Zeus are climbing down the steel cable from the bridge to the cargo ship, the steel cable runs out and as it does the truck is pulled to the edge of the bridge. You can see the pulley system used to pull the truck sideways.
Corrected entry: When Bruce Willis shoots the men in the elevator, he gets blood all over his right ear and cheek, and then when he falls out of the elevator and gets up to talk to Zeus it is all gone.
Correction: You see Bruce Willis washing the blood off.
Corrected entry: At the very end of the film beside the Nord des Lignes truckstop, John McLane makes a phone call on the Canadian payphone. However he has only collected American quarters from the German drivers and hence wouldn't have any Canadian Currency.
Correction: Canadian quarters and American ones both work in the same machines.
Corrected entry: Dick Cheney makes a cameo as an NYPD police official.
Correction: That is not Dick Cheney. Although the director said it was in an interview, it was later revealed he misspoke and that was not Mr. Cheney. Here is a copy of a trivia entry on IMDB regarding this: On the DVD commentary Director John McTiernan mentions that Dick Cheney appears in a scene. He actually says "here he is", but Dick Cheney is not in the film - the person shown in the scene has a slight physical resemblance but is not Dick Cheney. The director made an error.
Corrected entry: At the end of the movie at the Canadian border, is revealed the sign of the location of the terrorists: "Nord des lignes" "la grande stop du Québec". The translated sign reads: "North of the Border" "Quebec's largest truckstop". "Nord des lignes" does not mean "North of the Border" in French. It means almost nothing but can be translated as "North of the lines". The grammar in "la grande stop du Québec" is also wrong. It should be "Le grand stop du Québec". This is also not a correct translation for the English equivalent.
Correction: In Quebec, 'Nord des lignes' makes sense and means north of the border.
North of the line, north of the border. Same meaning.
Nord des lignes means north of the lines. A border is only one line not multiple. Even if you use the English idiom of "line" to indicate a border, then it still does not make sense. The proper French phrase is "nord de la frontiere".
Correction: It exists a "montage des lignes", so it's totally accurate from a Quebec point of view.
Correction: Canadian French differs from French in many ways.
Corrected entry: How would McClane know that there were bad guys in the truck (in the aquaduct) when he shot through the door? Granted he had his hunch and whatnot, and the guys really WERE German baddies, but how could McClane have been sure? What if he'd shot two innocent bystanders?
Correction: Because earlier on, the foreman for the aqueduct said that no one is working down the tunnel. It's also obvious because McClain saw the trucks design used in the heist previously.
Corrected entry: In the scene where everyone is talking to Simon for the first time in the police station, the psychiatrist says that Simon was giving clues to his identity, and that one of those clues was his speaking in German. Simon never spoke in German during that conversation.
Correction: Simon speaks German in his first line on the telephone in that scene.
Corrected entry: In the scene when Simon asks Inspector Cobb to have McClane come to Harlem on the phone, he just mentions the address/location and the Inspector hangs up the phone. There are no further instructions given, as to what McClane has to "do" at Harlem (which McClane does in the subsequent scenes).
Correction: The camera comes in close to Cobb's eyes as Simon speaks. His eyes react after Simon has mentioned Harlem, then we hear Cobb shout out "Kowalski" to the bullpen. The next cut is from further back, where we see Cobb hanging up the phone and barking instructions to his men. There are two very common cinematic techniques being used in the phone call sequence. The first is a timecut. When Cobb answers Simon's call and then when he hangs up the phone are actually two different scenes that occur probably several minutes apart. The second technique is prelapped dialogue, which is when dialogue from a later scene is heard over the previous scene. So when Cobb shouts "Kowalski," it's not actually occuring during the closeup to his eyes, but in the second scene timejumped a few minutes later. Simon gave further details during the intervening (offscreen) minutes between the two scenes.
Corrected entry: When McClane first pulls truck driver Jerry over, he sneaks a peak through the cover on the top of the truck. During the next overhead shots entering the aqueduct and whilst in the aqueduct, Jerry's truck cover is missing and the truck is empty.
Corrected entry: In the North of the Border scene when McClane shoots at the wires to the North of the Border neon sign, one of the two wires falls and takes out the chopper. McClane then walks back to his downed chopper, looks back at the North of the Border sign, and you see two wires going to the sign.
Correction: If you look closely at one of the shots just before Willis shoots the wires (1:59:58), you can see that there are 3 wires going to the sign, not 2.
Corrected entry: The gold storage in the Federal Reserve Bank is actually below the subway tunnels. So the bad guys wouldn't be able to steal the gold the way they do in the movie.
Correction: Yes we do see that the level of the gold storage is below the subway level. But the 'bad guys' came with a huge ramp to gain access from the ground level to the train platform level below. It is not beyond belief that they have another smaller ramps for other split level transfers. Obviously the operation was planned carefully and they came fully prepared. Just because we don't see how they transfer the gold from the storage to the trucks, it doesn't mean it is impossible.
Corrected entry: As John and Zeus are running to the park for the second bomb they are talking about the incident from the first film, John says that he threw Simon's "little" brother out of a window, yet when John was talking to the FBI agents they did not mention whether Simon was older or younger then Hans.
Corrected entry: Simon's henchmen blow up the dam with a suitcase bomb. Although the tunnel would make a superb conductor to carry sound waves, Bruce Willis and the audience hear nothing of the explosion. (01:22:00)
Correction: Actually we do hear the explosion. At the same moment McLean closes the truck door, we hear a muffled explosion which McLean reacts to as if the door made that noise.
Corrected entry: In the scene where McClane and Zeus are arguing by the fountain, McClane is slamming his near-empty water jug around as he berates his 'new best friend'. Moments later his container is seen to be almost full, with exactly two gallons of water.
Correction: There are some scenes in between these two scenes, and more than 'a few moments' passes. It's clear that they had been experimenting with the water jugs in the intervening time.
Corrected entry: Since Ricky was the one who read the report on the 14 great big dump trucks stolen from Statton Island, wouldn't he have noticed the 14 great big dump trucks that drove by him when "Bob Thompson" showed up?
Correction: Why should he? There must be hundreds of dump trucks in New York City, and there was no reason for him to suspect that these were the stolen ones. After all, there had just been a severe terrorist act and a lot of rubble to be cleared, so when a city official turned up with trucks and workers it seemed like everything was OK. And how many people count the number of trucks in a column?
Corrected entry: When Zeus begrudgingly accompanies McClane to their first riddle site at the pay phone (where the terrorist tricks them into thinking there is a bomb in the trash can), an extra walks past them going towards the street corner. Seconds later when the camera angle switches, the same extra walks towards the camera again going the other way.
Correction: Are you saying you've never started off in one direction then pivoted when you remembered something or caught yourself walking the wrong way? I wish I were that coordinated....
Corrected entry: When Samuel L. Jackson slams on the brakes and gets out of the cab on Wall Street to catch the phone call from Jeremy Irons, you can see various tyre marks that were caused by previous takes.
Correction: This kind of "mistake" has been posted and corrected for a number of films. The car is on a busy road which is marked by skidmarks. Why do that have to be "from previous takes"?
Corrected entry: When Zeus goes to Yankee Stadium, the terrorists tell him to report to the home-team dugout. Yet when Zeus goes to Yankee Stadium, he is shown at the dugout along the third-base line, which any Yankee fan knows is the visitor's dugout. Given he knew which dugout he was meant to go to, and the importance of the situation, this can't just be a character mistake.
Corrected entry: What would Simon's plan have been if John hadn't gotten to the subway bomb in time? If it had exploded before he evacuated all the civilians, there would be lots of dead people as a result, meaning the cleanup would have taken much longer. Simon wouldn't have been able to get his people into the vault, so basically his plan relied on the sheer luck that McClane got to the bomb on time.
Correction: This is a question and not a plot hole. The plan was for the bomb to go off and not to be thrown out of the train. The cleanup didn't affect the plan to steal the gold.
Corrected entry: When dump trucks show up outside train station where Charlie is and Simon introduces himself as detective Bob Thompson of the city engineers office, Charlie doesn't recognise him or the guy on the side of the dump truck, even though in a previous scene Charlie was in the van when the FBI was showing the pictures and explaining to McClane and Zeus about Simon being Peter Gruber and the other two.
Correction: He was sitting in the back, he didn't see the picture. Even if he did, then it's a character mistake, hardly a plot hole.
Correction: That's not the pulley system for pulling the truck sideways. It's the cable that McClane & Zeus are hanging from that is attached to the truck. It runs out of cable & starts pulling the truck sideways towards the edge of the bridge.