Press > Goofs > Escape From New York


• Factual errors: While briefing Hauk about "David 14," Rehme says the jet is "Seven miles out and closing." Even at a leisurely 300mph (the cruising speed of the Convair 580 aircraft the Air Force One model was based on), the plane would have reached them in under a minute and a half. Yet they have plenty of time to get to the control center and ID the aircraft before it even crosses the river.

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The American flag on the right-hand side of Air Force One's tail is not reversed. In reality it would have the stars in the upper right to represent a real flag moving forward. However, the flag could have been changed in the alternate history within the movie.

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: The President is clearly British. In order to qualify for US presidency you must be a natural-born US citizen and have lived in the US for 14 years, but he could have been born in the US and grown up in the UK, moving back as an adult, or even born abroad to US parents.

• Continuity: When the USPF initially go into New York immediately after Air Force One crashes, helicopter 3 is shown landing, and a large chunk of the sticky back black plastic used to create its USPF livery is peeling off and missing from the tail section, revealing the green US Army livery underneath. (The UH1 Huey used in this scene was on loan from the Missouri National Guard.) When it takes off again a few moments later, the tail is back to perfect black.

• Factual errors: Actor Lee Van Cleef (Bob Hauk) mispronounces Black Flight (the Special Forces unit Snake served in) to Black Lights during his first meeting with Snake. Black Flight is clearly in the script.

• Continuity: Snake's time limit was stated as 22 hours, but his Master Life Clock started at 22:59:57, or 23 hours.

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: At the start, the scientist tells Snake they cannot neutralize the explosion until 15 minutes before the deadline. In other words, it can be neutralized anywhere from 15 minutes to a fraction of a second before the deadline, but no sooner. Therefore, it is OK that Snake lets the timer run down to 6 seconds.

• Continuity: After Snake takes off in the glider, Charles Cyphers is seen in the control room wearing a shirt and tie. In the next shot, he is wearing a suit jacket, which he then takes off. He wears the shirt and tie for the remainder of the scene.

• Factual Errors: When Snake lands on top of the World Trade Center tower, his altimeter indicates less than 200. The tower was over 1300 feet.

• Continuity: When Snake first receives a signal on the President's Life Signs transponder, he radios Hauk then checks his mission timer. The timer reads 18:50:18 (and counts down to :14 seconds). As the scene is fading (at the :14 sec. mark), the timer changes to 17:50:14.

• Continuity: Air Force One is shown in flight as an aircraft with engines mounted at the back either side of the tail. The wreckage on the ground and the computer image on the USPF computer as it crashes are of a 737 type aircraft with the engines mounted on the wings.

• Continuity: The interiors shots of the plane before the crash are from a wide-body airliner. However, the wrecked fuselage seen on the ground is not a wide-body.

• Revealing mistakes: Walls in the "Choc Full o' Nuts" building are clearly made of Styrofoam.

• Revealing mistakes: During the sequence where Snake is being chased by the Crazies (and is about to shoot an oval pattern in a wall so he can break through), his eye patch shifts enough to reveal a perfectly good eye.

• Continuity: When Cabbie takes Snake to see Brain, Maggie answers the door. She goes inside first. Snake follows her and Cabbie goes in last, shutting the door behind him. But now in the indoor shot, Cabbie and Snake are in front and Maggie is way behind them.

• When Snake gets into the LTD after knocking out the driver, you can see the bars in the windows jiggle revealing them to be rubber. This is especially noticeable in the shot from the front of the car.

• Continuity: When Snake drives the station wagon through the gauntlet of convicts on Broadway, they pelt the car thoroughly with broken bricks. Immediately afterwards we see the vehicle from several angles, filthy but not actually dented.

• Errors in geography: The scene at the train station is clearly not in New York. The city's two rail stations, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal both have their tracks located below ground level.

• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When The Duke is shooting at the handcuffed President, we hear the sound of very loud, echoing gunfire even though he is conspicuously using Snake's submachine gun equipped with a rather large silencer.

• Continuity: Toward the end, the helicopter lands just outside the prison walls, and it's broad daylight. The rest of the film takes place at night, even though the times given indicate clearly that the helicopter landed only moments before the subsequent action.

• Crew or equipment visible: You can see a crew member giving Isaac Hayes a "stand-up" cue quite visibly in the left side of the screen when The Duke is quieting the Grand Central Station crowd.

• Errors in geography: New York's 59th St Bridge is referred to as the "69th St Bridge." Here is the story: The 69th Street Bridge was invented by John Carpenter since they could not stop the ten-lane, double-decker traffic of the George Washington Bridge and could not afford to rebuild it somewhere else. The 69th Street Bridge was built somewhere between 1980 and 1997 and Debra Hill suggested calling it the Richard N. Nixon Memorial, or even the John B. Anderson Memorial, but that was before the election. In a later interview John Carpenter claimed naming it the 69th Street Bridge was a cheap adolescent joke. In a more recent interview John Carpenter claims he did not know New York that well and that it was meant to be the The 59th St. (Ed Koch Queensboro) Bridge.

• Revealing mistakes: When Brain stabs Romero in the storeroom and lowers him to the floor, Romero drops the last few inches and Brain is left holding the "knife" but you can see there is no blade.

• Continuity: Baseball bat falls off the head of the gladiator, but is back again in subsequent shots.

• Continuity: In the gladiators' ring, Snake cripples his opponent with a spiked club hammered into the lower abdomen and genitals. Very rapidly Snake wrenches it out to strike him in the back of the head, killing him. The now-dead opponent is leaning on the rail lines, and we can see the pale colored floor. No blood.

• Crew or equipment visible: Crew fingers visible closing elevator door after failed escape run to glider. Seen on widescreen DVD edition.

• Factual errors: As The Duke drives his car toward Maggie on the bridge, she fires her six shot revolver seven times at the car.

• Continuity: Right before Snake's fight with The Duke at the end of the film, he watches his timer which says 00:01:32. Then after the President shoots the Duke and Snake gets the micro-bombs deactivated he waits for 10 seconds and watches his timer which reads 00:00.02. However the time elapsing between the two times he checks his timer is 00:02:08, but according to what we see on the timer in the film only 00:01:30 should have past.

• Continuity: When the President shoots The Duke, the cable to bring Snake up from the city is clearly under the railings; but when Snake reaches the top, the cable is over the top railing.

• Continuity: When the bombs in Snake's arteries are deactivated, he raises his right hand to his left wrist to display the time on his countdown clock. When we see a close-up of the clock as time runs out, Snake's right hand is not there. But when we switch back to the previous view, his right hand is still pressed against the clock.


Escape From L.A.


• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When Brazen showed the hologram of Utopia hijacking the plane; Brazen said 1140 hundred hours (military time for 11:40 am), when you look out the windows, it is night time.

• Factual errors: The submarine should not disappear off the monitoring screens just because it fell back into the water.

• Continuity: The wristwatch counter shows 6 hours 59 minutes. Then he is told he has seven and a half hours left.

• Continuity: When Snake first encounters Cuervo in his limousine, his head tracks at three times the speed of Cuervo's car.

• Factual errors: No matter what the technology, an electromagnetic pulse will not damage a battery, as is claimed in the film.

• Continuity: When Snake is attempting his fifth shot at the basket, the automatic timer shows 3 seconds twice.

• Continuity: During the fight after the basketball game, Cuervo drops the black box twice.

• Continuity: The size of the dot that Map of the Stars Eddie paints on the disk changes.

• Continuity: When Snake approaches the Happy Kingdom amusement park on the hang glider (with the others) the sun is just coming up. Half an hour later (in the story), when Snake makes it off LA, it is dead of night.

• Continuity: In the final fight scene between Snake and Cuervo, Cuervo's knife disappears occasionally from the ground.

• Revealing mistakes: When Snake is making his escape from Anaheim in the chopper, you can see the shadow of the wing-rotor blades under the body of the helicopter from a light source below it.

• Continuity: Near the end of the movie when Snake is escaping in the helicopter Cuervo's bazooka is empty. You can see through barrel. Then four seconds later the bazooka fires.

• Revealing mistakes: During the climactic battle scene, when Steve Buscemi's character is hanging off the helicopter, several stores are visible in the matte shot behind him. One of the prominent buildings is clearly marked "Miniatures", a reference to the filmmaking technique.

• Revealing mistakes: Snake's "hologram" casts a shadow on the grass.