Plot hole: General George Deckert orders his men to kill the President "Get rid of him", but once this execution, that would make perfect sense in the context of his plan, is interrupted by the cannon shot he spends all the rest of the movie until the very end to drag the President with him for no reason. The longer he keeps him hostage, the more difficult for him it is to cover the story up in any way. (01:18:00)
Plot hole: The whole premise of the movie and Deckert's plot is moot; as Steele exposits, Deckert, who is the Secretary of Defense, wants to put in the same spot "President, VP, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State." Because, it's "The chain of command. He takes them out, he's what?" Simply, he's NOTHING, because the Presidential Succession includes before the Secretary of Defense the President of the Senate (higher than the Secretary of State) and the Secretary of the Treasury. Deckert's plan was useless. (01:03:55)
Plot hole: The gimmick Stone uses to escape is cartoonish in its silliness; he just puts in the bathtub a bunch of stuff he heated in the microwave in a vaguely human silhouette, and the police is fooled into thinking that that mass of heat their thermal scanners pick up is him. That's of course idiotic on many levels; a bunch of slabs of meat and hot pocket boxes, all heated at different times, is not gonna look at all like human temperature, and we also have to assume the extraordinary circumstance that the police switched on the scanner only whenever XXX was ready for this trick and not much earlier when he was talking with the agent or preparing the bathtub enchillada. They even show the scanner already on when Agent Kyle Christopher Steele is walking out. (00:46:20)
Plot hole: Forgetting the fact that Charlie Mayweather knows everything about General Jack Pettibone's home including where he keeps his shirts (somehow the same size as Ice Cube...), and that there's nothing in his home that tips anyone about its owner (both can be explained), what is pretty hard to explain is how did this Machiavellian plan work when Darius made a hasty very early exit from the party the General was at, they drive to his house in that fast sports car, and...his corpse is already there, or at least is by the time Darius gets out of the shower. If this was the plan all along, it hinged also on the fact that Darius would have been at the party (he arrived on his own, not with Charlie) and chose of all the possible moments and actions to get close to the General and eavesdrop on the exact moment when the bad guy talked to him; they needed also picture proof. That's all levels of arbitrary and impossible.
Plot hole: To taunt Agent Augustus Eugene Gibbons, General George Deckert namedrops Darius Stone. Gibbons looks at him genuinely shocked, which the General acknowledges scoring an important moral victory and establishing himself further as a Machiavellian villain. The problem with all this is that Gibbons would have to literally not know what he's been doing and why up to that point, to think that the General, who is also the Secretary of Defense, does not know about it.Gibbons broke Darius out very openly, from a military prison that is the only maximum security correctional facility in the Department of Defense. His reason to bring Darius out was also, explicitly, that Deckert is targeting the ex members of their unit (which is, we have to assume in retrospect giving perhaps too much credit to the screenplay, the only reason why Gibbons could execute such a flawed plan to begin with and why Darius is still alive). So, Gibbons being surprised that his adversary "knows", after a couple of days even, is pure absurdity.
Plot hole: Agent Kyle Christopher Steele ordered roadblocks for 10 miles, Stone just destroyed a state police patrol car blocking a major bridge, but he is able, with no explanation, to just get away with that one encounter with the police and bring back his hyper-recognizable monster van from the countryside to Georgetown with no problem. (00:25:00)
Plot hole: The NSA base in Virginia is assaulted. Gibbons escapes after noon/early afternoon and gets to the United States Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas, the day after. Another day passes for the prison escape, and then another day to get back to DC. The FBI agents are hanging out at the crime scene in full force three days after, but during all this time nobody sealed or covered with as much as a tarp or put any perimeter around the huge entrance holes; makes little sense to guard the doors with a dozen agents and leave huge uncovered (not to mention dangerous) holes leading to the core of the building. Even worse, the hard drives of the people they are supposedly investigating (Gibbons) are still there. They would have been sent to the labs to be analyzed, especially since they have been wiped clean, which would only enhance the suspicions. (00:21:00)
Plot hole: The destroyed NSA base is in the middle of nowhere and patrolled by dozens (we see at least 8 agents just by the barn outside) of federal agents, but Shavers, who provides nothing of relevance to the mission since he's not even the getaway for Stone, is able to just park in plain sight in the vicinity and stalk it with binoculars. With that level of surveillance, his van would have been spotted and approached for identification by the feds in no time. (00:20:35)
Plot hole: Movies constantly cheat with helicopters that suddenly and silently arrive to save the day, but the scene goes beyond that; Ice Cube is fighting guards on the rooftop of the military maximum security prison at Fort Leavenworth. He suddenly jumps off the roof to catch the passing helicopter. Without even mentioning the noise problem, which is obvious and huge, that helicopter would have been spotted already by radars, prison snipers, the same guards that were battling Ice Cube, it flew in plain sight of a military installation! And raised no wind at all on the terrace flying at jumping distance from its ledge. (00:12:45)
Plot hole: Gibbons is presumed dead and is an NSA officer with no documents or anything, but in the space of a couple minutes from furious shootouts he's the man who orders everyone around, summoning Black Hawks and all sorts of military forces just like that - and supposedly the whole army in the vicinity is hostile and loyal to the bad guys, even. (01:21:40)
Plot hole: The last part of the movie focuses entirely on what will happen to the President, but as per the villain's plan (wrong and incomplete, but it's another issue) he needed to kill also the VP and the others before him in the succession. The bad guy already lost 20 minutes before the end of the movie but the movie refuses to tell us the obvious and it's simply swept under the rug or forgotten. (01:16:20)
Plot hole: XXX and his ex (as redundant as it sounds) are learning from the TV the news of Gibbons' demise. He then tells Shavers "Let's get to work" and they plug the hard disk in, for the very first time because they realise that it's been wiped clean. It is night, and their mission was during broad daylight; if Gibbons had to wait nighttime to sneak into his own home, he could have easily helped them out during their mission, and it's absurd that they just sat on the crucial hard disk while chilling and watching the nightly news. Gibbons' house is billed as "Chevy Chase, Maryland", so it's just a few minutes away from their position. (00:31:00)
Answer: To break the surface of the water making an easier penetration. Hitting water at high speeds can be like hitting concrete. By stirring up the water it "softens" the impact.
EMTurbo