Sneakers (1992)
Goofs
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Anachronisms (1) |
Audio/visual unsynchronised (3) |
Character error (3) |
Continuity (10) |
Errors in geography (1) |
Factual errors (7) |
Incorrectly regarded as goofs (5) |
Revealing mistakes (6) |
Spoilers (2)
Anachronisms
In the opening scene, set in 1969, the display terminal is clearly showing IBM VGA 40-column text. The IBM VGA standard was not developed until 1987.
Audio/visual unsynchronised
When Whistler shifts the van from reverse to drive, it makes the sound of gears grinding as if it were a manual transmission. An automatic transmission does not grind gears together, but the shifting motion clearly is that of an automatic.
After Bishop has described crossing a bridge, the shot switches to the van on a bridge. The first sound of a car going over a seam matches up with the van going over a seam, but for the rest of the shot, which includes the sound of several more seams, the van doesn't cross another seam.
Crease, explaining the "Man trap" security access booth, can clearly be seen saying, "Otherwise you'll be trapped in a steel-reinforced booth...," but is heard saying, "Otherwise you'll be caught..."
Character error
While the guys are videotaping Janek working in his office, he gets up to open the door to let Dr. Elena Rhyzkov in, and you can see the electronic keypad on the door. However, no one in the team notices it. Later, we see Bishop practicing picking a standard door lock, and when he arrives at the door, the electronic lock is a surprise to everyone. Since they are able to zoom in on Janek's keyboard when they are trying to get his password, they could have zoomed in on the door to see the electronic keypad, and been prepared for it.
The "180 IQ" guy, Brandes, is listed in his computer profile as being blond and having blue eyes. In the bar, he is brown-haired and has brown eyes.
Believing that he has located a hidden Martin Bishop, Wallace fires his pump-action shotgun into the ceiling four times, each time cycling the weapon to eject the spent shell casing and chamber a fresh shell. When Martin finally emerges and surrenders, Wallace cycles the weapon a fifth time without ever firing a fifth shell, thereby ejecting a perfectly good and usable round from the gun. While this may have been done intentionally in order to startle and intimidate Bishop, it also seems like a needless waste of ammunition.
Continuity
When Whistler is driving the van, one of the headlights gets smashed, yet is operational in a subsequent shot.
For a brief instant during the confrontation in Cosmo's office, the gun that Liz is holding has the slide back, indicating that it is empty.
When Martin is released at the corner of Hyde and Lombard, it should be the morning but, as the camera turns around him, the brightest spot is on the ocean, clearly, the evening.
When Liz and Werner Brandes are dining in Chinatown late into the night, it is clearly getting light outside the window at one point, but then returns to being dark.
When Bishop is marched into Cosmo's office at gunpoint, there are four light switches by the door, two of which are flipped up, two flipped down. However, when Cosmo leaves a moment later, they are all flipped up.
When Elena Rhyzkow is trying to seduce Dr. Janek, she takes off her blouse. He first allows her to kiss him but then he refuses her. Less than five seconds later, she tries to seduce him again and she takes off the blouse she already took off at the first attempt.
When Bishop calls the NSA from Liz' apartment, he presses the buttons on the telephone with his left hand. In the next shot he removes his right hand from the telephone.
When the Sneakers are recording the conversation between Janek and Rhyzkov, Janek says he must finish his work, then there is a gap before Rhyzkov says she left a message. When the Sneakers replay the message moments later, the gap is significantly shorter.
Bishop's hands and body position in the tunnel scene, while the shots are being fired.
When Wallace is firing the shotgun at Bishop in the ceiling, after his final shot, he ejects the shell. After Bishop moves the ceiling tile to surrender himself, Wallace ejects the shell again.
Errors in geography
When Bishop calls the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, he dials the 202 (Washington, D.C.) area code.
Factual errors
To circumvent the thermal security sensors, the temperature in Cosmo's office is raised to 98.6° F to match normal internal body temperature. Coming from a normal room temperature environment, Bishop's exposed skin would have been only about 91° to 94°, and his clothing even cooler, about 85° to 89°. This may have been enough of a difference to set off the alarm. The office should only have been warmed up to about 90°.
If Dr. Elena Rhyzkov is indeed Czech, as mentioned in the film, her last name should actually be Rhyzkova, the female form of Rhyzkov.
When Whistler is setting up the phone rerouting system to defeat the trace, the computer screen shows one of the cities listed as Durban, South Africa (an eastern coast city) but the actual location is clearly pointing to Cape Town, South Africa (a western coast city)
When Martin kicks in Dr. Janek's office door, there's no damage to the frame. At least part of the frame would have splintered.
In the credits and the subtitles, Dr. Elena's surname name is consistently spelled "Rhyzkov," but pronounced correctly by everyone as "Ryzhkov." "Rh" is not a phoneme that occurs in Slavic languages, and, in those languages, "Z" and "Zh" are separate letters, not interchangeable..
Even with this technology, wiping out the RNC bank account would constitute a crime. Even suggesting that this could not be traced would still lead to an issue of where this money came from as you could never spend it or redistribute it even abroad.
At the end when Carl asks for a phone number from the woman with the Uzi, she is not holding an actual Uzi, but rather an MP5.
Incorrectly regarded as goofs
It is often asked how Bishop gets the answering machine into the office. He carries the backpack in his briefcase, and this can be seen when he opens it in the engineer's office. The answering machine can be seen in the backpack.
When Bishop is practicing lock picking on the way to Janek's office he is only using a pick to manipulate the lock. This wouldn't work as you also need a tension tool to hold the pins in place once you have set them with the pick. With his method the pins would simply spring back into place as soon as he removed the pick.
When the gang discovers that the circuit is the ultimate code breaker, and when Whistler has Carl enter different sites for them to connect to, Carl enters numbers on the keyboard's numeric keypad. Assuming standard Internet addressing nomenclature, and the fact that this movie is presumably set in the early 1990s, the numeric address would be IP4 formatted addresses: 4 octets with each number between 0-255. Carl doesn't enter anywhere near enough digits for actual routing to different sites across the Internet.
There are five bridges across San Francisco Bay. The film lists the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge, the San Mateo, and the Dumbarton. It misses the Richmond bridge.
Bishop goes to the trouble of defeating the voice entry system, which leads him to being caught. While Carl catches up with him via the access vents, getting into them needed a decoy gardener, and sending two people into the bathroom would have attracted attention.
Revealing mistakes
The ceiling tiles that Martin and Carl use to move around above the floors in the Playtronics building are the hanging type, quite fragile like cardboard and would not be able to support an adult's full body weight.
In the limousine, after Gregor finds out who Wallace works for, he tells Martin, "You disappeared once before, my friend. I suggest you do it again". But how could Gregor have known this? It seems doubtful that Martin would share such sensitive information with a potentially dangerous member of counterintelligence and not his closest associates. Creese even says to Liz that she was the only one who knew Martin's secret.
When Cosmo swipes his ID card at Werner's office, the magnetic stripe is facing away from the reader.
In Dr Janek's office, the crew are talking to Bishop through a transmitter in his ear, and it is clear that this cannot be heard by someone else in the room. Later in the Playtronics building, the crew are talking to Bishop who is in the ceiling, and someone on the ground can hear this through the ceiling.
Liz records the bulk of Werner's voice in a noisy restaurant with a band playing but when Martin plays the recording for the voice recognition system, no background noise is heard.
When Wallace is shooting at Martin while he hides above the ceiling, one of his shots destroys a tile in a spot where Wallace obviously hadn't aimed.
Spoilers
Plot holes
Whistler immediately recognizes the "cocktail party" as geese babbling. But Martin was kidnapped after the evening concert and dumped the following morning, so it would have been dark when he was driven past the reservoir, and the geese would have been silent.
When Marty infiltrates the Playtronics building with Werner Brandes' I.D. the movie makes a point of showing that Werner's entry into the building and his office has been logged and printed. When the real Werner comes to the Playtronics building with Liz he has to argue with security that she is part of a plot. They eventually take him up to his office to look around before letting him and Liz go. But if they had simply checked those logs it would have shown that he had apparently entered the building and his office earlier that night, thereby revealing the deception.
