The Fugitive

The Fugitive (1993)

56 mistakes - chronological order

(26 votes)

Continuity mistake: Just before Harrison takes his leap from the pipe in to the dam, Tommy Lee Jones tells him to put his hands up. When Ford puts them at head height, Jones then tells him to put them above his head. Ford does this from the far out shot, but when there is a close-up of his face, his hands are at head level. This occurs in a fraction of a second so there was no chance for him to move them.

Continuity mistake: Kimble arrives at a hospital to shave himself. He opens a drawer and places medicines on top of it. The amount and type changes between one frame and another.

Sacha

Other mistake: When Kimble is heading towards the dam driving the ambulance in the tunnel, his lane is empty in the wide angles, yet in the close-ups he is swerving the steering wheel violently as if there were cars ahead. This keeps changing back and forth.

Sacha

Character mistake: After Kimble jumps from the drain pipe over the waterfalls, the scene goes to Gerard standing in the pipe telling his crew to leave, then they all leave without picking up Gerard's gun that Kimble threw down next to him.

Continuity mistake: After the bus crashes, Kimble unlocks his hands and throws the keys onto the floor in front of Copeland. Two shots later the keys are lying in a different position when Copeland grabs them off the floor.

mightymick

Revealing mistake: When the movie begins and Kimble is questioned by the cops, the blood on his T-shirt remains red, instead of dark red or brown due to oxidation.

Sacha

Visible crew/equipment: During the parade, Gerard motions for the other guy on his team to stay to the right. There are a couple of shots of the parade, followed by the one where Gerard looks over the green wall. As this is happening, the camera is moving to the left. Look in the windows of the building. You can briefly see it pass.

manthabeat

Continuity mistake: When the landlord's son is arrested, it's snowing, and the following scene is during the St. Patrick's Day parade, with no snow on the ground. The only other time there was snow was when the other fugitive was arrested/killed, so they must have filmed that the same time of the year.

Continuity mistake: The prisoner starts foaming at the mouth and pulls the sharp implement from his sock, but when he is shot, he collapses back in his seat with no sign of the foam around his mouth.

Continuity mistake: Kimble puts the worker's uniform on over his prison uniform, but when he takes it off to tend to his wounds, we only see him remove the worker's uniform, with no sign of the prison uniform.

Other mistake: During the St. Patrick's Day parade, the camera shows a clock that displays the temperature, which is supposedly 23°. None of the spectators or performers we see is dressed for that temperature. They would be way more bundled up than they are. Everybody is dressed for weather in the 40s or so.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: 20s is nice and toasty.

Continuity mistake: When the Marshals go to arrest Copeland, they are in Whiting, IN. When the Sheriff's car comes through, it is an Illinois State Police car.

Visible crew/equipment: The camera filming the wide shot of the press conference with the US Marshals and Chicago PD blends in with the rest of the camera crews there doing the conference. It is blatantly visible behind everyone asking questions. The angle from this camera is used at least twice. You can identify it by its film magazine. Almost all news organizations in the 1990s used video tape as opposed to film, so a film camera used during a press conference would and does stick out like a sore thumb.

manthabeat

Character mistake: The investigators say that the prints found in Sykes' apartment belong to Kimble after dusting for them, making it clear they didn't use any equipment for fingerprint analysis or testing. No forensic investigator would confirm who the prints belong to until they run a thorough analysis. It seems as if they were basing the fact that they belonged to Kimble because they traced the call to the apartment, rather than acknowledge that the prints could belong to someone else.

Movielover1996

Continuity mistake: When Kimble leaves the hospital and the detectives arrive, it's dark outside. However, when they're interviewing the nurse, you can see it's daylight outside.

Factual error: In the train crash scene there are many mistakes. 2 locos are pulling a hand full of cars, a small switcher loco would actually have been used. Oil journal bearings that haven't been used for decades. A flat car carrying logs, but there is no logging in the Chicagoland area. The second loco for some reason derails. In reality the train would have just pushed the bus a few hundred feet with no derailment. The shed explodes. The 200 ton loco just slides along the soft ground.

Richard Kimble: Do you remember what I told you in the tunnel?
Sam Gerard: Um, yeah. It was noisy, I think you said something like you didn't kill your wife.
Richard Kimble: Remember what you told me?
Sam Gerard: I remember you pointing my gun at me.
Richard Kimble: You said "I don't care."
Tracing tech: He's on the south side.
Sam Gerard: Yeah. Yeah, that's right, Richard. I don't care. I'm not trying to solve a puzzle here.
Richard Kimble: Well, I *am* trying to solve a puzzle.
Cosmo Renfro: Five seconds to location.
Richard Kimble: And I just found a *big* piece.

More quotes from The Fugitive

Trivia: After his escape, it shows Harrison getting on a train marked with the name "Kimball" and then in the next shot, a helicopter flies over a hotel called "Harrison".

More trivia for The Fugitive

Question: Towards the end, before the confrontation with Kimble and Nicholls, the guy who was tracing Kimble's phone records tells the Marshalls that Kimble telephoned Sykes on the night of his wife's murder. But obviously it wasn't Kimble calling Sykes, it was Sykes using Kimble's phone. But why would Sykes be calling himself?

jenn_s_h85

Chosen answer: He didn't. A key plot point is that Nichols borrowed Kimble's car on the night of the murder. The call to Sykes, which is expressly stated by the marshals as being on Kimble's car phone, was from Nichols, presumably arranging to meet so that he could give Sykes Kimble's keys to get into his house to lie in wait for him.

Tailkinker

Thank you for explaining it. I've seen it several times and never realised how it went down.

And Tommy Lee Jones tells Kimble that they knew Nichols called Skyes from his car, but how? Wouldn't the more logical answer have been that the US Marshals thought that Kimble called Sykes from his car to tell the killer his wife was home alone? There is no way the US Marshalls would have known that the Kimble let Nichols borrow his call - that's the mistake in the movie! It actually should have made the Marshalls suspicious of Kimble, not exonerate him.

The Marshals know Kimble let Nichols borrow his car because Kimble told the police when he was initially interviewed following the murder. He gave a detailed account of his actions and whereabouts that night and mentioned that Nichols had borrowed his car. It didn't seem suspicious to the police at the time because Richard claimed he fought with a one armed man he didn't recognize; a story the police did not believe because there was no evidence of this and Kimble's wife "identified" her attacker as Richard. Gerard puts everything together when he realises that Nichols lied about knowing Lentz.

BaconIsMyBFF

How did Sam figure out that Nichols borrowed the vehicle and made the call to Sykes and gave him keys, etc? I know in the laundry he reveals that he knew this but when/how did he figure it out?

Answer: This is more of a question really. What kind of defense attorney did this high dollar, Dr. Kimble hire who do not show their defendant pictures of the one-armed men the police question? How do his attorneys not ask him "OK, which of these one-armed men did you fight with in your house?"

The prosecution is not required to inform the defense of every person the police interview or question. They are only required to give the defense whatever evidence they have against the accused. Simply questioning someone in a perceived dead only counts as evidence against the accused if the prosecutor mentions it in court. If the prosecutor were to say "We interviewed a one-armed man named Sykes and he says he doesn't know you", then Kimble's defense would be required to be given access to Sykes. We can assume this never happened.

BaconIsMyBFF

The Chicago police DID question Sykes after the Kimble murder. Review the scene where Sykes returns to his apartment after Kimble has been there. Girard starts asking Sykes questions, at first Sykes says he doesn't know anything about Kimble but then "remembers" that he had been interviewed by the police right after the Kimble murder. However, Sykes says that he gave the police an alibi, with 15 people supposedly confirming that Sykes was on a business trip and not in Chicago. The movie then implies that Sykes had been a Chicago cop and lost his arm "in the line of duty." Remember that the Chicago police focused on Kimble pretty quickly. Their investigators may have interviewed Sykes, but they likely didn't even come close to considering him as a potential murderer. Even with Sykes likely matching Kimble's description of the one-armed man, the police likely saw Sykes as a former cop... A former cop who had an alibi confirmed by 15 people. As I understand it, prosecutors don't have to tell defense attorneys about everyone that the cops question. They only have to tell the defense about potential witnesses that might be called in connection to the criminal trial. In this scenario, Sykes wouldn't have been part of the criminal trial (Again, supposedly on a business trip confirmed by 15 people on the night of the murder) and thus Kimble and his lawyers would never have known about his existence.

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