Goofs for
True Lies (1994) More at IMDbPro »

• Continuity: Harry's dinner jacket momentarily disappears when he sets the radio explosives at the embassy.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Obvious stunt player performs Harry flipping up from sliding on his back through the snow.
  
  
• Continuity: Harry's coat is dry after riding through a fountain.
  
  

• Continuity: Tire tracks visible on the carpet in the hotel before Aziz rides through.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: The urinal flexes when the bad guy's head is thrust into it.
  
  
• Continuity: Bullets in the bathroom were fired at an angle, but the holes were straight.
  
  
• Continuity: During the Hotel striptease, the phone is on the floor when Helen places the bug, but it is on the bed when Harry is handcuffed.
  
  
• Continuity: Aziz's position after he kicks open the toilet doors.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Tape holding explosives for bullet holes in the toilet doors.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Reflected in the toilet paper dispenser in the booth where the old man is sitting.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Wrinkle in the drop screen that is supposed to be the city when Harry is talking to his horse on the roof of the hotel.
  
  
• Continuity: Juno's face is cut before Helen slaps her.
  
  
• Continuity: The cut on Juno's face switches sides during the fight in the limousine.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Harry grabs and fires a gun with no visible hammer; it's a Heckler and Koch pistol that is specifically designed with an interior hammer thus enabling it to fire.
  
  
• Factual errors: The holes in the bread vans are smaller than the 25mm rounds fired by the Harriers.
  
  
• Factual errors: Bullets fired from an AK-47 would not shatter the canopy on a Harrier jet. This was known by the filmmakers, but the shattered canopy was included to avoid having to worry about reflections on the canopy glass.
  
  
• Continuity: Disappearing bullet holes in the Harrier jet.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry is outside the office building in the Harrier Jet you see a shot of a group of terrorists inside the building on one of the floors. They look out at the jet and Harry smiles back. The inside shots show the glass of the windows to have no tint. Yet on the other floors of the building you can see tinted windows on interior shots. Also the shots of the plane outside the building reveal that the glass has a mirror tint on it, and Harry could not have seen clearly into the building.
  
  
• Factual errors: The drysuit that Harry is wearing at the start of the film has the zip across the back (this can be seen as he is pulling the suit off over his head). This type of drysuit is impossible to take off without help from another person ("self-donning" suits have a zip across the front of the body).
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry is returning the Corvette to the lot, the car to the right side disappears halfway through the skid.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Harry is being chased from the mansion, he is attacked by two Dobermans. The Dobermans jump at him and get 'coconut crunched' together. The dogs used at that point were rubber. One of the rubber dogs' eyes pops out and can be seen flying off the right side of the screen when using frame-by-frame advance, as well when they fall to the ground they bend and crease like rubber (they also bounce).
  
  
• Continuity: The motorcycle starts falling as soon as Aziz drives off the roof of the hotel, but he is clearly in a newly elevated position when he is shown falling into the pool.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: While Harry is escaping from the mansion, Gib is driving the van down a very icy road, yet once Harry gets in the van and Gib takes off, the tires squeal, implying that the van was taking off on dry pavement.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the opening sequence when Harry is accessing the billionaire's computer he boots it like a Macintosh. The Mac sound plays but the screen displays the boot screen for Windows 3.1
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the bomb goes off in the Aziz camp, you can see the springboards the stuntmen are flung from.
  
  
• Continuity: Although Helen doesn't wear shoes for most of the film's last half-hour, the soles of her feet are perfectly clean during the limo catfight.
  
  
• Continuity: Although Helen was wearing the same outfit since being kidnapped from her striptease for Harry in the hotel, she is wearing less revealing underwear when she is in the back of the limo as the bridge is being demolished.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Aziz and Dana are on the crane, Dana slips and you can hear her say "Someone help me" but her lips aren't moving
  
  
• Factual errors: The Statues of purported "Persian" origin are actually Assyrian.
  
  
• Continuity: At the beginning, when underwater, Harry is using an underwater welder to cut the gates, he is not wearing gloves, in the next scene, a gloved hand with knife rises out of the ice.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: When Harry takes a ride with Simon in the Corvette the camera is reflected in the windshield for several seconds.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Harry chases Aziz through the hotel, Aziz blows by a bellhop who falls back into a chair, causing it to fall over. As is does, we see the spring-loaded device underneath the chair to assist it in pushing it and the bellhop back.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry and Albert had Simon on the dam wall, the dam wall is wet. The next we see it, the dam wall is almost completely dry.
  
  
• Continuity: Harry breaks the window of the van but it is intact in later shots.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: In the scenes following the horse chase, during a briefing on who Harry was chasing, the video on the big screen is paused, yet the burned in time code for the video keeps rolling. If the timecode was indeed burnt in, it should have stopped, if it wasn't, there is no need for it.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: After the EZ Van has exploded on the highway on the bridge in the Florida Keys, shots from the helicopter's point of view show that what should be the burning wreckage of the van is in fact merely two flame throwers firing into the air.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Juno checks her cheek with her hand after Helen hits, she rubs her hand across where the blood is and looks at her hand, obviously having picked some up, but the blood on her face doesn't smear.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: While Dana is hanging onto the front of the jet she yells, "Oh my God, do something." to Harry because in a effort to get rid of Aziz, his jacket strap gets caught on a missile on the jet. As we hear audio of Eliza Dushku's voice, her mouth does not match up with the words we hear.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry punches the guy who rifle butts Helen, he does so with his left hand hitting him on his right cheek. A moment later he is seen holding his left cheek.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Dana is on the nose of the jet, in some shots it is clear she is wearing a harness under her trousers.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry notes the missing page in the printout he stops his car on a sidewalk and the car's front wheels are straight. After speaking with Albert, Harry returns to the car and it's clearly seen that wheels are turned to the left.
  
  
• Continuity: When Aziz was kicking open the stall doors in the bathroom scene and Harry knocks down the stall door to escape, the angle shows Aziz standing far away from where Harry knocks down the door. The next scene (continuing this sequence) shows Aziz much closer and at a different angle when he starts firing his weapon at Harry.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Harry and Gib are being followed by Aziz and two other guys in the station wagon, the view from inside the station wagon shows Gib pulling over and the station wagon pulling over. When it cuts to the view from inside Harry's car they are just pulling over and the station wagon is pulling over behind them.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When chasing Aziz to the hotel, Harry is going west and tells Gibb to be on the south side. Aziz first turns right and runs into Gibb, which puts Gibb on the north side of the street.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The when the lead terrorist, Aziz was videotaping his threat to United States, he described the island where he was, as "uninhabited". Of course with a bridge costing millions of dollars leading to that island, it was inhabited with people, but he's not going to tell the truth to the world when making a threat on videotape.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry is reading the transcript of Helen's phone conversation with Simon, the first line shows Helen saying, "Helen Tasker, litigation." But in the voiceover, she says, "Hello?"
  
  
• Factual errors: Early in the movie, when Harry is accessing the computer, which happens to be running a version of Microsoft Windows for what probably is Persian (Farsi). This language is written from right to left, just like Arabic and Hebrew. Harry types some sort of password into a pop-up window and the typical asterisks used to mask the password appear from left to right. They should have appeared from right to left.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Harrier's exhaust can reach temperatures of up to 2700 degrees. The exhaust heat can melt standard asphalt and most certainly parts of the police car.
  
  
• Factual errors: Towards the end, right after the nuke goes off on the island, in the next scene, the cloud is completely missing from the background. Clouds from a nuke explosion tend to linger on an on for hours at a stretch.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Harriers used in the movie are AV-8B models. During the closing credits where credit is given to the Harrier model that was made for filming, the Harrier is said to be an AV-8A model. This is clearly wrong as the B model has a completely different frontal look to it then the A model.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: In the opening mansion scene, Harry invites Juno to tango and then yanks her toward the dance floor. Juno lets out a little yelp but her lips don't move.
  
  
• Continuity: In the scene where the truck is teetering on the edge of the bridge the pelican that "lands" on the dash is wet while the pelican that flys away is dry.
  
  
• Continuity: When Harry rides through the kitchen on the horse, a waiter coming out drops a tray on with glasses. In the next shot, we see the floor and the tray and glasses have disappeared.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the scene where Harry punches Simon in the car, we cut to a shot of Simon with a bloodied mouth and nose. In the next shot, he has no sign of injury. This is purposely put in the movie as a "dream" or "fantasy" to show what Harry wants to do to Simon.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the scene where Harry punches Simon in the car, we cut to a shot of Simon with a bloodied mouth and nose. In the next shot, he has no sign of injury. This, in fact, is a brief fantasy sequence, showing us what Tasker would like to do to Simon rather than an actual event, hence the lack of injury not only in the next shot, but the rest of the scene.
  
  
• Errors in geography: For the truck chase scenes along the Seven-Mile bridges, the terrorists are attempting to deliver the nuclear warheads from the Keys to Miami. They are driving on the older bridge with the newer bridge to the right, which mean that the trucks are heading South towards Key West. If they were heading North towards Miami (as the scene would imply), then the newer bridge would be to the left side, not on the right.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the scene when Harry and his team are giving their boss a dossier on Salim Abu Aziz, they are watching a tape of Salim walking. They ask for the tape to be paused at one point to give a good shot of Salim's face, and even though the tape stops the timer for the tape keeps running.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: During the scene where Harry is trying to pluck Helen out of the Limo sun-roof whilst suspended from the helicopter the tail of the camera helicopter is visible on at least two occasions.
  
  
• Factual errors: When Aziz fires his AK47 at the stalls in the bathroom, it produces a "spread" that would be impossible to produce with an AK47 at that close of a range. Additionally, the bullets from an AK47 would have very easily penetrated the stall walls even back to where Harry was hiding.
  
  
• Continuity: During the scenes where Juno takes Helen and Harry to Samir to interrogate Harry, it is shown in several shots (but only briefly) when Helen is sitting on the stool that something is between Helen's legs/thighs. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be a hand grenade.
  
  
• Continuity: After Harry heads into the mall followed by the two terrorists, Gibb tells Harry the third guy is still in the car. When Gibb calls Doris you can see the terrorists car in the background. Before the bus pulls in to obstruct Gibbs view of their car you can clearly see the car is empty. Where did the third guy go if Gibb was keeping an eye on him?
  
  
• Plot holes: Aziz is very upset when Harry attempts to conceal the fact that he knows what the warhead is, apparently because Aziz needs Harry's videotaped confirmation before the world will believe that he can detonate the nukes. But Aziz is well into preparations to detonate one anyway, long before the tape could have been delivered or broadcast. So the world will know when it goes off. There was therefore no need to threaten Helen or ever bring Harry to the island.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When Helen tells Aziz that Harry can't ID the warhead, Aziz says "If you are wrong about him, the last thing you see will be your blood spraying across his face." This suggests that, if Harry IS a spy and can ID the bomb (Helen being wrong), Aziz will kill her. He should have said, "If you are RIGHT about him..."
  
  
• Factual errors: The AV-8B Harrier fired at least 10 times as many 25mm rounds than the aircraft can actually carry.
  
  
• Continuity: Just prior to firing the Sidewinder missile, Harry selects "Master Arm" on the instrument panel. Master Arm needed to already be selected to fire the gun.
  
  
• Continuity: When Helen drops the machine gun down the stairs and it shoots all the bad guys, in one scene it shows the gun falling off the last step and landing on the ground. In the very next scene, it shows the gun land ON the last step and come to a rest.
  
  
• Factual errors: When speaking about the warhead, the movie refers to it as being composed of "14.5 kilograms of uranium with a plutonium trigger." The only uranium nuclear weapon made was made by the United States ("Little Boy") whereas all other nuclear weapons are based on a plutonium pit of fissile material, uranium is only used for the reflector. In either case, the "trigger" is made of conventional high-explosives which force an implosion of the fissile material to start the nuclear chain reaction.
  
  
• Continuity: After Helen drops the machine gun down the stairs, several men are shot by the bouncing gun. As the last man falls at the bottom of the stairs you see Helen's machine gun bounces off the stairs onto the ground. Yet the next scene shows the gun still bouncing down the stairs and stopping on a stair.
  
  
• Factual errors: The concrete Aziz has poured over the warhead is way to "wet." It would take way too long to cure.
  
  
• Continuity: When Helen is about to leave the hotel room, just before the terrorists break in, the back of her dress is unzipped. Moments later when she is grabbed by a terrorist, the back of dress can (briefly) be seen zipped.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: When Harry dives into the water to escape an explosion, bubbles coming up from the camera crew are clearly visible.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: On the island when Aziz fires the M-72 LAAW into the fuel truck, he extends the launcher but does not arm the weapon before firing the weapon. Just in front of the rear sight there is a trigger arming handle that needs to be pulled out to allow the trigger bar to depress and fire the rocket.
  
  
• Factual errors: Harry's daughter could not hang on the front of a Harrier while it was in the hover. She would be instantly sucked into the engine.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Harrier cannot fire the gun while under 200 knots of airspeed - while hovering - because the smoke from the gun would be ingested into the engine causing a loss of thrust and an inability to hover.
  
  
• Continuity: Just before her striptease assignment, Helen modifies her dress. At one point, she holds fabric she ripped from her sleeves as she tries to rip away the collar. Then, in a closer shot, the sleeve fabric is nowhere in sight.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the missile carrying Aziz blows up the helicopter, pieces of burning wreckage strike the glass of the building and bounce off, revealing that they are made of foam. Pieces of steel would almost certainly break the glass on the outside of a building.
  
  
• Plot holes: How did Aziz know Harry was in the washroom?
  
  

• Factual errors: SPOILER: The last part where Harry launches Aziz on a sidewinder missile that hits the helicopter: Sidewinder missiles cannot carry significant loads. The dry weight of that missile is about 140 pounds and adding an additional 190ish pounds would render it unable to fly properly.
  
  
• Factual errors: SPOILER: If the missile could carry Aziz, a sidewinder missile accelerates to Mach 3 within seconds. Such accelerating force would definitely cause a burst blood vessel in a human brain and Aziz would not be able to scream all the way to the helicopter.
  
  

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