The Fugitive

The Fugitive (1993)

56 mistakes - chronological order

(26 votes)

Visible crew/equipment: When Kimble starts to move out from under the train, he looks up and we see smoke visible above. There is also a crew member looking down into the hole on the far right side of the opening. The person's head moves up at the end of the shot.

jmat

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

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

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.

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: Director Andrew Davis had Harrison Ford start the film with a beard, and then shave it off, rather than using a disguise for Richard Kimble throughout the film.

More trivia for The Fugitive

Question: When Kimble is in the hospital with the boy he changes the diagnosis to what? I have tried to look but it cuts away as he's writing it down on the boy's file.

Answer: Kimble is watching as the doctor, Al, looks at the chest film and states "possible fractured sternum, he's stable," and we can see Kimble's very bothered by that. Then Kimble is told to take the boy to observation room 2. When Kimble questions the boy and looks at the chest film, Kimble ignores what he was told, and instead heads directly for the surgical OR. In the elevator he draws a line over the incorrect essential diagnosis: "depress chest w/ poss fr" (possible fracture), and begins to write "Ao," then he scribbles a signature on the Patient of Dr line. The essential diagnosis Kimble writes is presumably an Aortic trauma - a life-threatening critical injury and requires immediate attention. So when Kimble brings the boy to the OR (instead of observation room 2) for the immediate emergency surgery, he tells the doctor the boy was sent up from downstairs. The child is then taken to operating room 4, STAT, thus saving the child's life.

Super Grover

Its a pneumothorax, is air trapped between the lung and the ribcage and it's very common.

Answer: When Richard changes the diagnosis, the first thing he writes down is "AO" which is medical shorthand for aorta. Many people who have medical degrees and saw the movie speculate that Joel had an aortic tear. This would cause blood to flow into the chest cavity making it difficult to breathe and with the impact from the crash it could have caused the fatal injury. An aortic tear requires immediate surgery and by changing Joel's diagnosis, Kimble was able to save his life.

Answer: The presumption is the boy was misdiagnosed and he changed the chart to the correct diagnosis. The doctor says later that he saved the boy's life. Most likely he changed the charge to order specific tests.

Answer: It's never specified what he changed the orders to, nor is it important to know. This was done only add to the plot where the other doctor noticed him looking at the X-ray, arousing her suspicion, then creating suspense as Kimble barely escapes from the hospital.

raywest

We know it isn't important know, it's just a point of curiosity.

True and if you notice that's the always reliable Julianne Moore as the other doctor. This was the first movie that she did that was lampooned in Mad magazine, the next would be Mocking Jay Part 1.

Rob245

"The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Hannibal" were both lampooned by Mad before "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1."

Bishop73

I totally get that you're curious about it. Just saying that filmmakers usually aren't concerned with showing small details like that. They use broader strokes to tell the story.

raywest

A lot of film makers do put in small details into their work. Yes, some are lazy, for example, repeating 1 or 2 paragraphs in a news article too look like they whole page is filled. Others take time to have the whole thing filled out, even adding funny things for the viewer who paused the video to read. This is why there's a lot of trivia entries and questions about what something small was or meant. A casual viewer wouldn't know if what they saw meant something or was the film makers being lazy.

Bishop73

More questions & answers from The Fugitive

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.