Goofs for
Sneakers (1992) More at IMDbPro »

• Continuity: 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.
  
  
• Continuity: When Whistler is driving the van, one of the headlights gets smashed, yet is operational in a subsequent shot.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: It is often asked how Bishop gets the answering machine into the office. He carries the backpack in his briefcase - this can be seen when he opens it in the engineer's office. The answering machine can be seen in the backpack.
  
  

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: 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.
  
  
• Continuity: When Liz and Werner Brandes are dining in Little Japan late into the night, it is clearly getting light outside the window at one point, but then returns to being dark.
  
  
• Continuity: 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.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When chasing Marty at PlayTronics, Buddy reloads after his last "warning" shot into the ceiling (cornering Marty). When Marty comes down from the ceiling, Buddy reloads for a second time without taking a shot. The shell ejects, but sounds like an empty (used) shell as it hits the floor. (Reports vary somewhat on this last point, but in any case, he pumps twice without shooting between.)
  
  
• Continuity: Bishop's hands and body position in the tunnel scene, while the shots are being fired.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: 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..."
  
  
• Continuity: During the manhunt for Martin in the PlayTronics building, some of the security monitor shots are of the same hallway Martin wandered through getting to Janek's lab.
  
  
• Continuity: 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.
  
  
• Errors in geography: When Bishop calls the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, he dials the 202 (Washington, D.C.) area code.
  
  
• Continuity: When Bishop is taken to Cosmo's office, Cosmo uses the device to update Bishop's criminal record - so it is obviously integrated into Cosmo's system. When Bishop returns to steal the device, it is sitting on Cosmo's desk, not in use at all.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: 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.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): 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.
  
  
• Factual errors: 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)
  
  
• Factual errors: When Marty crosses Cosmo's office to get the device, the room temperature should be 98.6: at that temperature he should start sweating at once, but on the way back his shirt he looks dry and his shirt is completely dry.
  
  
• Continuity: When the Sneakers are recording the conversation between Janek and Rishcov, Janek says he must finish his work, then there is a gap before Rishcov says she left a message. Playing it back later, the gap is significantly shorter.
  
  
• Continuity: In the scene where Mother is watching the monitors as a security guard disables the video link, he mutters "Oh-no". Bishop, hiding in the building crawl space responds "Don't say Oh-no". The only way to communicate to Bishop from the truck is by radio handset or headset - Mother has neither.
  
  
• Continuity: 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.
  
  
• Plot holes: If Carl Abegast can get to Cosmo's offices from the ceiling ducts to (help) save Bishop and Liz at the end, why did the Sneakers need to get the voice security password information from Werner Brandes? They could have just sneaked into the offices from the lobby bathroom as does Abegast.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): The "180 IQ" guy has listed in on his computer profile as being blonde and having blue eyed. In the bar, he is brown haired and has brown eyes.
  
  
• Continuity: When Bishop and his team first see Playtonics, there is a clear blue sky in the background. But later, when they were looking at the video, there was a mountain the the background.
  
  
• Continuity: When Wallace is shooting at the ceiling for Bishop, he is reloading the pump shotgun after every shot. Cosmo stops Wallace after reloading but before shooting his last, deadly shot. When Bishop lifts the ceiling tile and "gives up", Wallace re-cocks the shotgun unnecessarily again and an empty/spent cartridge hits the floor.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When bishop is stealing the box back, he was moving slowly because of motion detector, however in the shot there are fish shown in the office moving faster than he is. Those fish should have set off the motion detector.
  
  
• Factual errors: Dr. Elena Rhyzkov should be actually named Dr. Elena Rhyzkova. In Russian, an a is always added to the end of the surname if it is a woman.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): While the guys are videotaping Janek working in his office he gets up to open the door to let Dr. Elena Rhyzkov in you can see the electronic keypad on the door. However no one notices it as 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 the 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.
  
  

• Plot holes: SPOILER: As the Playtronics security guard is calling to find out what happened to Carl after he went into the bathroom, he looks out the window and sees Mother dressed as Carl. He hangs up and turns away. Mother then says he's leaving. How did Mother know the security guard had seen him? One possibility is they tapped the phone line, but given the amount of security that seems unlikely.
  
  
• Plot holes: SPOILER: 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.
  
  
• Plot holes: SPOILER: Near the beginning of the film, Cosmo's henchmen show up at the Sneakers' office and pretend to be NSA agents. So, obviously, Cosmo and his evil crew know exactly where the Sneakers' office is. Then, at the end of the film, after the Sneakers successfully steal the Black Box from Cosmo, they stupidly go right back to their office. After they trick the real NSA agents, the film then concludes with the implication that the Sneakers kept the super-secret cryptography chip. But Cosmo has already demonstrated he would do anything and kill anyone to get his hands on it. So why doesn't Cosmo simply send his henchmen once more to the Sneakers' office to get it back?
  
  

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