Goofs

Rocket is still visible inside the rocket launcher immediately after being fired.

The first shot of the license plate reads "D-FENS". Later, when the Prendergast bumps the motorcycle, the plate is "D FENS" without the hyphen present.

In the burger scene, after Bill shoots, an old man tries to escape. At the beginning of the next scene, the same actor, dressed differently, is in another restaurant.

When Foster is on the gang's property fixing his shoe his socks are black. Earlier in the film they can be seen to be white.

When Bill Foster (D-FENS) is walking up to the Korean store owner's food mart, his socks are white. Throughout the rest of the movie, his socks are black.

The golfer having a heart attack grabs the right side of his chest with his left hand, not vice-versa. While this isn't impossible, pain from heart attacks almost always occurs on the left side.

Prior to firing the M-72, Foster does not pull the safety out, hence he should not have been able to fire the rocket.

The movie is set in Los Angeles, California. In the opening scene during the traffic jam, there's a police motorcycle passing through but with no solid red light when the lights are on. At the end of the movie, there are police vehicles without a solid red light when facing forward. According to the California vehicle code, all law enforcement and emergency vehicles are required to have at least one solid red light facing forward when their front emergency lights are activated.

In the store when Bill calls his wife and makes the Apollo 13 reference, the spacecraft was actually prior to the point of no return when the service module exploded. The reason why the spacecraft couldn't return early was because was because the service module near the main engine was damaged and they did not want to risk lighting the engine up for fear that the ship may explode. A free-return trajectory was advised and they returned safely.

Police leave the restaurant without paying the bill.

M-72 LAWs are unguided rockets, not heat seeking missiles like the neo-Nazi character implies. This may have been an intentional mistake by the film-makers for that character.

In the opening scene some people think that Bill is trying to roll his window down when the crank mechanism stops working, making it impossible for the police officer to reach through the window to steer the car off the road when it's being pushed. But Bill is not rolling the window down - he's trying to roll it up to block out the sound of the outside world. In later shots the window is about half open, making it possible for the police officer to reach through to steer the car.

The crack on Bill's right lens in the second half of the movie appears to vanish at some points but this is just a trick of the light - when Bill faces directly into the camera, because the frame is undamaged and holding the cracked lens firmly in place, the crack is very difficult to see but still just about visible.

When Foster checks his watch at the Whammy Burger, it is 11:33, three minutes past when service cuts over from breakfast to lunch. However, as he looks/walks around, the restaurant is full of customers midway through their lunch food, despite it just becoming available three minutes ago.

This is plausible, if the menus overlap. It could be that the lunch menu starts at, say, 11:00, even though the breakfast menu does not stop until 11:30.

In the final confrontation scene on the pier, all the chambers of Prendergast's revolver are clearly empty while he is pointing it at Foster.

When he confronts the two men in his store while Foster is looking at boots, Nick ("Surplus Store Owner") pulls what appears to be a nickel-plated revolver from a holster on his right hip. A short time later, in his back room, Nick again draws a handgun from his right hip to subdue Foster, but this time it's a semi-automatic pistol with a dark (perhaps blued) finish. It's unlikely that Nick would be carrying two different handguns on the same side.

In the first shot of the opening scene, if you look closely, you can see that the driver's side front door of Bill Foster's car was taken out in order for the camera to move freely out of the car.

As Prendergast and Sandra prepare to go to Venice to talk to Beth, Sandra remarks how the Venice Police Department told her that they couldn't justify sending an officer to Beth's house for a third time. Because of D-FENS' propensity for violence, refusing to send an officer to check on Beth could have opened the Venice Police department to liability if something would have happened to her. Also, because the request came from an LAPD officer, it's unusual that the Venice Police Department would have refused because police agencies generally try to cooperate with each other in investigations.

In the gangland scene after he gives his "pissing ground" speech, he tries to walk away before they stop him and demand his briefcase. He refuses to give it to them, yet he was going to walk away without it.

Prendergast's revolver clearly rotates to the empty chamber when he fires.

As Prendergast is asked for his gun, he empties the bullets into his hand, and then drops them into his take-home cardboard box. Both the gun and the ammunition would be turned over at the end of the shift.

As the two gay men leave the Nazi's store, one of them tips over the sunglasses display and yells, "Fascist!" However, his lips don't move.

Just before shooting the phone booth, Bill says "Geez that's too bad because, you know what?" to the man who wants to use the phone. The man says "What?" but his lips don't move.

When Foster is running on the pier and the aerial camera is following him, film trucks can be seen in the background before the camera pans towards him.

In the opening scene, when the camera first pans onto the car with the Garfield doll, two big flat light-diffusers can be seen in the half-open rear window. If you look even closer, the boom mic and some people are visible standing behind the diffusers.

After intruding a plastic surgeon's private property and cutting his hands, Foster is seated on his knees talking to the caretaker and his family. In the reflection of his glasses a crew member can be clearly seen on his knees as well as other crew members (instead of the family).

During opening scene the Steadicam operator is reflected in a car

In the opening scene when the shot moves from close up of William Foster's face, via other cars, back to Foster's car, you can see the drivers door and part of the roof is missing.

When Bill is at the Whammyburger and tells the employees to turn around and look at the picture of the burger on the menu board, the boom mic is clearly reflected in it.

Detective Sandra appears to carry her service weapon in a purse that she carries as the gun is not seen holstered on her person. Any detective not acting undercover would wear their gun in a holster on their hip or shoulder-holstered so as to be readily accessible quickly. Carrying it in a purse puts her at a great disadvantage if she had to draw quickly.

Asking for Prendergast's signature the delivery man says, "put your John Doe right here". A signature is often called a John Hancock, but never a John Doe, which is law-enforcement lingo for a male suspect whose name is not known.

33:08 A man resembling to be Mexican is shown on the street selling the contents of two bags. He goes around hawking "Nueces" ("nuts" in Spanish). But later on the contents are shown and it's peanuts instead of nuts. A Mexican (or Latin-American) individual wouldn't make such an error: "nueces" and "cacahuates" don't even sound alike in Spanish.

When the gang member Angie (Karina Arroyave) is doing her best to describe Foster (Michael Douglas), she points to Prendergast (Robert Duvall) and says, "he looked like him only taller". Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall are the same height.