Continuity mistake: After the fight on the bridge Ethan drives away in the Mercedes. But the road was blocked by the yellow truck. And if the Mercedes had been in front of the yellow truck in the first place, its driver would probably have driven away instead of leaving his car.
Factual error: When Ethan hangs Davian from the plane's floor hatch, Davian's head is already all the way out of the plane with the air outside blowing at him. Yet when Ethan pulls him up we find that Davian overheard Ethan's name. With the fast wind blowing at his ears he could never hear anything but a deafening roar, making Ving Rhames voice inaudible even if he were screaming.
Continuity mistake: Near the end of the movie, when Tom Cruise is running through the narrow streets in China, while on the phone with the guy from IMF, he is nearly struck by a truck coming very quickly from an adjacent street. In the next shot, they show the road from which the truck had just come. The thing is, it's filled with people, none looking like a large truck just went barreling by. The truck was going at too high a rate of speed to have come from the heavily populated street.
Continuity mistake: When Ethan - after getting the rabbit's foot - calls Musgrave, his location is shown on a map. He is in the northern part of Shanghai, quite some distance from Pudong, the area south of the river, where the high rise buildings are. However in the next clip, he drives down the on-ramp to The Bund, which is the street right next to the river, opposite Pudong. So he's been driving in circles - and extremely fast.
Continuity mistake: When Davian and Hunt are fighting in front of Julia, Davian slugs Hunt on the floor and walks for the gun. Hunt is twice seen lying on a floor with no glass, the second shot a close-up showing his face and clean arm. In the next shot, as Hunt rallies and goes to rise from the same body position, he's lying in piles of glass and has glass stuck to his arm.
Deliberate mistake: Ethan draws the outlines of the buildings on the window. But the drawings line up with the real buildings from the camera's viewpoint, not as Ethan would see them.
Continuity mistake: When Ethan is offered the task and refuses, he is told that just in case he has a change of heart, that the team will be "wheels up at sunrise". When he arrives the next day, the sun is much more in the position of late morning.
Continuity mistake: When the IMF team, plus a few more for protection, are in a helicopter, the protection team, two of them, plus Ethan, are hanging outside the helicopter, all strapped in, of course, but, suddenly, the door is closed and everyone is inside.
Factual error: In the scene where Davian gets hit by a truck, there is a shot of a taxi afterwards. The Chinese characters read 'bus' rather than 'taxi'.
Suggested correction: He is simply making a quick, crude sketch of the buildings to illustrate his fulcrum idea. It did not need to be within line of his eyesight. He just needed to quickly demonstrate his idea to the team.
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