Goofs for
The Parent Trap (1998) More at IMDbPro »

• Continuity: Numerous problems with hair continuity: When Annie-as-Halley talks to Meredith from the pool, strands of hair around her left ear shift position from shot-to-shot. When Annie tells Chessy who she really is then talks with her dad, her pigtails jump from her front shoulder to her back shoulder three times. When Nick Parker speaks with his ex-wife after falling in the pool, his hair alternates between slicked straight back in close-ups, to combed to his right in two-shots. After speaking with both daughters, his hair is semi-parted and combed toward his left. His wife's hair also alternates from completely pushed back (by a pair of sunglasses) in close-ups to strands hanging in front of her right ear in two shots.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: In the opening credits, when Elizabeth and Nick are signing the wedding certificate, though two different names are signed, the hand writing is the same.
  
  
• Continuity: Nick Parker's sunglasses disappear as he introduces Annie (as Hallie) to Meredith
  
  

• Continuity: When Nick and Annie (as Hallie) are driving from the airport to the vineyard, the weather is sunny and the road is dry. As they pass through the entrance into the vineyard, the driveway is very wet and then when they get to the top of the driveway it is dry again.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie and Annie drag Meredith's air mattress into the lake, they are shown wading several inches into the water in order to push it into the current. However, when they are watching Meredith drift away, their shoes/bottoms of their pants are completely dry.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie (Annie) is talking about how Nick and Meredith are going to get married, the part in her hair moves.
  
  
• Continuity: On their camping trip, Annie and Hallie sneak into Meredith's tent and drag her mattress in to the water. In the close-ups, we see that both girls' hair is half down. But in the next shot, when the girls are dragging Meredith in to the lake, we see one of the twins' hair is down and not half tied up.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie takes on Annie in poker at camp, Annie shuffles the cards. In the close-up, her nails are painted teal, but in the next shot and all through camp, Annie has unpainted fingernails.
  
  
• Continuity: Near the pool, when Annie and Hallie confront their parents and Meredith, Meredith's initial reaction is quickly looking at the twins standing on either side of her. While she looks directly at one, she looks way above the other one's head.
  
  
• Continuity: Hallie exits the cabin with her locket under her sweatshirt (interior shot), the locket is outside her sweatshirt as she emerges from the cabin (exterior shot), and is back under when she turns around to speak to Annie.
  
  
• Continuity: In the bar at the hotel, when Elizabeth and Meredith have just met, the camera moves from behind Elizabeth to behind Meredith, and the drink in Elizabeth's hand jumps from her hand to the bar.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: At Camp Walden, when the water ballons are falling onto Annie's head, you can see the arm of a crew member pushing the largest balloon to fall over.
  
  
• Continuity: When Elizabeth emerges from the hotel before Nick falls into the pool, the sky is bright and cloudless. When Nick climbs out of the pool, the sky in the background is full of clouds, and while he is drying off and talking with Elizabeth, the pool area is darker and the sun is clearly setting. A few moments later, when Meredith happens on the scene, the sky is bright again.
  
  
• Continuity: After Elizabeth exits the car in front of the hotel, Martin closes its door. But it's open again when we see a close-up on Hallie.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie and Annie are fighting in the isolation cabin over the lights, Annie's switch is up. But in the next shot it's down.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie calls Annie collect in California from the phone booth in London, she places a collect call. However, Annie answers it like a direct call and never accepts the charges.
  
  
• Errors in geography: The bird that lands on Meredith, waking her when she is on the air mattress in the middle of the lake, is a Red-Crested Turaco, indigenous to central Africa, not northern California where the scene supposedly takes place.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: In the cabin when the balloons are falling on Annie, she looks up as the biggest one is about to fall. She moves to the side so she's right under the balloon.
  
  
• Continuity: When Annie's mother requests something cold for her forehead inside her hotel room, Annie gets a rag, wets it, and wrings it out. When she hands it over to her mother, it is clean, folded, straight, and dry as if it were just ironed.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When Annie is dropped off at Camp Walden, she has three suitcases and one carry-on. When she goes to the Isolation Cabin, she only has two suitcases and the carry-on
  
  
• Continuity: After Hallie and Annie have fallen into the watering trough after fencing, they are soaking wet. Hallie's head went completely underwater but when Annie and Hallie remove their helmets, Hallie's hair is completely dry.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: After their father has fallen into the hotel pool and has emerged from it, Hallie and Annie both give him an intense hug while he is still soaking wet. Nevertheless, in the next shot the clothes of the girls are still perfectly dry.
  
  
• Continuity: After Nick falls in the hotel pool, he gets out to meet Liz. The pool water behind him is rippling as expected. But in the next shot as Liz and Nick are talking together, the pool water is perfectly still, as though nobody had been in the pool for several minutes.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When Annie is driving back home with her father she says camp was 8 weeks long. However, when Halley is talking to her mother they say camp was 6 weeks long.
  
  
• Continuity: While Annie (Hallie) and Elizabeth are having tea, Elizabeth's watch vanishes for the rest of the scene shortly after they are interrupted by Martin.
  
  
• Continuity: While Hal talks to Annie about mom as she leaves the band in her hair is green, in the next scene it’s white, in the next green again then back to white.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie is playing Poker with Annie for the first time, if you look to her right you can see her hand lying on the bed, before Annie has dealt the cards.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When Liz exits the car in the parking lot to the hotel she is wearing a beige women's work outfit. When she enters the hotel she is wearing a white jacket with a beige shirt underneath and white pants. Yet she forgets her purse and picks it up at the front desk and it is the beige purse she had when getting out of the car.
  
  
• Continuity: The ships register records the marriage on January 8th, 1986. The switch to Camp Walden is 11 years, and 9 months later. That would be early October, not the typical June-August summer camp time frame.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): In the scene when Annie and Hallie fence, they often turn around. This is a red card offense and means that the person who did not turn will get a point and the fencers stop and start again. If the teacher knew the rules for fencing, she would have stopped the match.
  
  
• Continuity: When Nick is breaking the news to Annie about the upcoming marriage, the hat on the couch next to her moves several times between shots.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie as Annie walks into the house in London for the first time, she clearly turns a knob on the door to walk in. When the shot changes as she walks through the door, the handle is gone.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: Nearly every time that Sammy the dog is shown barking at Annie (pretending to be Haley) you can see a microphone clipped to his fur far below where his collar could reach.
  
  
• Continuity: When Nick opens the special cabinet in the wine cellar, there are three bottles in the middle and a gap on either side. When he returns the last bottle, there are four bottles in a row without a gap.
  
  
• Continuity: In the final scene at the hotel, when Hallie and Annie tell their parents they want to go on the camping trip, the one on the left is missing her right earring. It should have been easy for the audience to tell them apart as the twin who had her ears pierced at camp was shown to have sore ears around the earring, notably in the scene where they're on the phone just before Hallie is discovered.
  
  
• Continuity: At the end of the opening credit sequence (on the QE2), the photographer comes over to take Nick and Liz's picture. In the shot showing the photographer (from behind the couple), there are lit candles clearly between the couple and the photographer. In the picture taken by the photographer, the candles are absent.
  
  
• Factual errors: After Hallie places a collect call from England to America, Annie picks up the phone after the first ring and is immediately connected with Hallie. The operator should have been on the line to inform Annie that she was receiving a collect call and ask if she would accept the charges.
  
  
• Continuity: When Elizabeth takes Annie (Hallie) to the studio there are yellow "No parking" lines outside in the street, but as the camera looks out of the window at them, they are no longer there.
  
  
• Continuity: After Nick falls in the pool and discovers the Hallie/Annie switch, he hugs each girl. In the next shot of them, neither is the least bit wet, although their clothes would at least have gotten damp hugging their soaking father.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): In the scene after Nick falls into the pool, there are several shots of Meredith in which both of her hands are visible but there is no engagement ring, despite the fact that she and Nick are at the hotel to plan their wedding, and she asked Elizabeth to make her wedding dress.
  
  
• Continuity: When Hallie and Annie are fencing at Camp one of the girls throws the sword behind her onto the bale of straw, but you see it landing behind the bale, followed by a close up of the sword spinning through the air and landing neatly on top of the straw.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: After the family returns from the camping trip, Elizabeth and Nick are talking on the porch. When Elizabeth says, "Well, they went out for a picnic," Her back is turned but her mouth is not moving.
  
  
• Continuity: When Annie and Hallie tell their parents they want to go on the camping trip, the twin on the left in the lighter pink shirt's hair style changes from one shot to another during the scene.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the girls are in Meredith's tent during the camping trip, their figures are only silhouettes. One of the girls says something, and the other replies but the sound comes from the same source, proving that in that scene the crew used a lookalike (probably a stunt double) and had Lindsey Lohan say both lines.
  
  
• Continuity: In the beginning of the switch, it begins with Hallie pretending to be Annie. At the end of the scene she says, "Speaking of dad, I wonder what he is doing right now?" But, a flight from the east coast to London is about 7 and a half hours, plus the time change in London, assuming it was noon in London it would be, four in the morning in California. In other words, Nick Parker would have picked Annie (pretending to be Hallie) up from the airport the day before.
  
  
• Continuity: In the cabin at Camp Walden, a water balloon falls onto Annie and makes her soaking wet. However, when we see her only seconds later, she is completely dry.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Nick and the girls return from the camping trip, they have a brief conversation with Liz and Nick before heading inside. During this conversation, when Nick is viewed on the left hand side of the screen, he is reflected in the glass of the door they are standing in front of. Although one of the twins is standing right next to Nick, we do not see her reflection, only Nick's. Even when she passes in front of the door, her reflection doesn't appear. (This is most likely a result of the camera tricks used to make Lindsay Lohan appear as twins.)
  
  
• Anachronisms: Annie tells Hallie in 1998 that she eats her Oreos with peanut butter, although Oreos were not introduced in Great Britain until 2008.
  
  
• Continuity: After Nick falls in the pool and then gets out, he meets Liz and they talk. The pool behind Nick (correctly) is ripply. However, in side shots of the two of them, the portion of the pool in the background is completely calm.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: The scene where Annie is sitting down about to get her hair cut, she obviously has holes in her earlobes, when in fact Hallie pierces Annie's ears after her haircut.
  
  
• Continuity: During the bedroom scene, where Hallie (Annie) tells her mother who she is, she is wearing the "H" locket - which should be in Napa with Annie pretending to be Hallie.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Hallie and Annie are fighting either light is on or off in their cabin, there are several light switch displacements.
  
  
• Continuity: When Annie goes to jump in the lake naked we don't see the bathing suit. In the next shot when she is on the dock, we can see a faint outline of one.
  
  

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