Predator 2 goofs

Template:Predator2 This article covers all the known goofs in the 1990 film Predator 2.

Continuity

• As the Colombians tool up before being slaughtered by the Predator, we see one attaching a bullet to the removable bolt of an Iver Johnson AMAC-1500 sniper rifle. A few shots later, we see him remove the bolt from the rifle. These two shots should be the other way around.

• El Scorpio takes a large hit of cocaine when he is tooling up, and a significant amount of powder is left on his moustache afterwards. In subsequent shots this cocaine is largely gone, even though he is never seen wiping it away.

• The rank insignia on Sergeant Reeger's uniform is contradictory — he has Police Sergeant I badges on his arms, but a Police Sergeant II badge on his cap.

• When the Predator watches El Scorpio on the roof at the beginning of the film, his guns are cold, even though he was firing them on full-auto just moments previously — the barrels should be glowing hot in thermal vision.

• The shell casings lying on the ground from when El Scorpio falls off of the roof shooting disappear and reappear between subsequent shots.

• As in Predator, the Predator's deadlocks disappear whenever its Cloak is active thanks to special effects limitations.

• The amount of blood on the body hanging from the roof following the massacre at the start of the film increases significantly in the shot of the Predator hauling the corpse away.

• The gold tooth in Gold Tooth's mouth disappears in the extreme closeup of him saying, "Shit happens."

• When examining the spear, Dr. Edwards says that the image they are viewing is at 150,000 times normal magnification. However, the monitor shows the image is only at 14,250× magnification.

• After their meeting, King Willie turns to the departing Harrigan and warns, "Prepare yourself." In the closeup of King Willie speaking his face is brightly lit, but in the subsequent long shot his face is suddenly shrouded in shadow.

• When the Predator jumps into the alleyway to confront King Willie, the ripple effect of its Cloak is not visible in the first shot of it landing in the puddle.

• King Willie's teeth are discolored and unhealthy. Yet the teeth in his severed head and on his skull as the Predator cleans it are white and healthy.

• The commuter who pulls a revolver on the gang members on the subway waves the weapon back and forth as he tries to intimidate them. As he swings the weapon to his right, he passes it around a vertical pole next to his seat. When the camera cuts he swings the gun back to his left, meaning he should have to pass it around the pole again, but the pole is nowhere to be seen.

• The laser sight on Jerry's SIG Sauer repeatedly switches on and off when he confronts the gang on the subway.

• As the Predator massacres the subway train's occupants, it throws the gang member with the black bandanna through one of the side door windows, completely smashing the glass and leaving his corpse hanging out of the side of the train. Later, an exterior shot of the train shows that the man's body has disappeared, and the window he was thrown through is intact once more. Later still, when Leona returns to the now stationary train, the door through which the gang member was thrown is now open and his body is still nowhere to be seen.

• As Pilgrim surveys the carnage on the train, another officer approaches him with a radio telling him that Chief Heinemann wants to talk to him. When Pilgrim takes the call the voice heard on the other end is not that of Robert Davi, who plays Heinemann.

• There is no blood at all on the ground around Jerry's body when Harrigan reaches it, even though he just had his skull and spine torn out.

• While in his trailer, Keyes informs Harrigan that the explosion at the end of the first movie covered 300 city blocks. However, in that film Dutch was able to run a safe distance from the blast in a matter of seconds.

• The mission timers on the screens in the OWLF trailer during the sequence where the team is attacked in the slaughterhouse are inconsistent. At first, they show a little over two minutes of footage has been recorded, but when we next see them, they show that only around a minute and a half has elapsed.

• When Harrigan busts out of the OWLF trailer, he grabs one of the men who attempt to stop him and we hear him choking, but as Harrigan turns him around it is clear he is holding him by the chin, not around the throat.

• When Harrigan is tooling up to confront the Predator in the slaughterhouse, he racks the charging handle on his Colt Commando assault rifle. After a brief cut to the action inside the building, we see him rack the charging handle again, even though the weapon was already loaded.

• When Harrigan guns the Predator down with his shotgun, its Bio-Mask can be seeing coming lose as it hits the floor. In the next scene, the mask is back on the creature's head, and Harrigan has to exert considerable force to remove it.

• The top part of Keyes' body never falls to the ground when the Predator cuts him in two with its Smart Disc.

• After losing its Bio-Mask, the Predator can still see in strongly-accentuated thermal vision exactly as before. However, in Predator the Jungle Hunter's vision without its mask was shown to be far less effective, taking on an overall reddish tone and doing a much poorer job of highlighting things in the environment. Evidently the mask is instrumental in refining the creature's vision, but this has been forgotten about in the sequel.

• The slaughterhouse where the OWLF team attempts to catch the Predator is at most 3 stories high, yet when Harrigan and the Predator continue their fight on the building's roof, they are suddenly 10 to 20 stories high.

• When Harrigan slings the Smart Disc over his shoulder on the ledge, we hear it power down and the flashing lights on its surface go out. When he is crawling along the ledge moments later, the lights are suddenly flashing again, despite the fact the sound effect used whenever the disc is active cannot be heard.

• The tunnel that Harrigan emerges from at the end of the film is far too small for the Predator ship to actually fit through.

• When the OWLF helicopter comes in to land following the Predators' departure, its engine can be heard powering down before it has landed. Later, when it takes off again, the opposite happens — its engine is not heard powering up until after it has already lifted off.

• As Harrigan mutters, "Don't worry, assholes. You'll get another chance," he holds the antique flintlock up beside his head in his right hand. In the next shot of Harrigan from behind, the pistol is suddenly down by his side in his left.

Plot Holes

• When Jerry advances through the train car during the Predator's slaughter of its occupants, he somehow manages to move right past the creature without noticing, ending up behind it at the back of the train. Even with the Predator's Cloak active, it seems highly unlikely he'd be able to pass so near to it without realizing, especially if it is busy slaughtering people.

• The weapons Harrigan uses in his final confrontation with the Predator all come from the boot of his car, which is still sitting where it crashed just outside the OWLF trailer. In reality, even a police officer would not have access to the kind of firepower seen inside — if nothing else, no one outside of the military would be able to obtain an M203 grenade launcher like the one mounted on Harrigan's CAR-15.

• After acquiring the Predator's Combistick on the roof, Harrigan has the perfect chance to run the creature through with the spear when it is standing on the ledge with its back to him, totally oblivious to his presence. Instead, Harrigan chooses to ineffectively shoulder-barge the creature, sending both of them over the edge and losing the Combistick in the process.

Factual Errors

• During one of the news reports at the start of the film, a banner on the screen identified a report as coming from "KCMQ Cable News". KCMQ would be a broadcast designation, not a cable designation, which are not restricted to the three- or four-letter format beginning with "K" or "W".

• When the two LAPD officers with the sturdy combat shields advance on the Colombians during the opening raid, we see sparks as bullets ricochet off of the metal shields. The location of these sparks, the flat shape of the shields and the fact the second man is somewhat behind the first would mean the officer in front should be getting hit in the back by at least some of these ricochets, but he is not.

• El Scorpio uses a DefTech 1315 37mm Launcher to blow up an LAPD squad car during the shootout at the start of the film. However, in reality the DefTech 1315 cannot fire high explosive rounds as depicted in the film and can only be used to launch less lethal ammunition (such as tear gas grenades or beanbag rounds).

• After Harrigan kills the Colombians outside the building at the start of the film, we see the Predator looking down at the corpses. However, the creature's thermal vision shows the corpses to be cold already. In reality, a body would take some time to cool down after death, especially in a sweltering heatwave.

• When El Scorpio bursts out of the room where the Colombians are massacred, the police in the hallway fire on him and he flees up a metal staircase. Harrigan then jumps up and sets off in pursuit, and as he does the special effects showing bullets sparking on the staircase can still be seen going off ahead of him. Given that he is directly between these bullet impacts and the police officers firing the rounds responsible, there is no way Harrigan wouldn't be hit, yet he continues unscathed.

• El Scorpio fails to crush a fairly flimsy-looking table when he falls from the roof, despite plummeting several stories.

• If the gang warfare in Los Angeles was as widespread and serious as is depicted in the film, it would likely have elicited a federal or state response. A reporter is also heard questioning why the mayor doesn't declare marshal law, yet this would be a state if not federal issue rather than a decision left to a local mayor.

• Voodoo is not practiced in Jamaica and actually comes from Haiti. The Jamaican religion similar to voodoo is in fact called obeah.

• Tony Pope uses a VHS camcorder, which would never be used by a television journalist (even one as low-rent as Pope) because of its poor image quality.

• Harrigan identifies the helicopter being used by the OWLF team as a "silver Alouette", presumably referring to either the Aérospatiale Alouette II or Alouette III. However, the helicopter used in the film is actually a Eurocopter AS355 TwinStar, which doesn't resemble either of the Alouette models.

• Subway trains generate considerable noise as they move at speed through bare concrete tunnels, in some cases up to 90 or 100 decibels (about as loud as a jackhammer). For the comfort of the passengers, most of this motion noise is kept out of the train's interior by the construction of the carriages themselves. When the Predator attacks the subway train in the film, it breaks in through the ceiling, leaving a gaping hole in the carriage roof that should now allow the sound of the train moving to enter the car, but in between the gunfire and screaming it is clear that the motion noise is still muffled, which would only be the case if the carriage's exterior had not been breached. Later a window is broken, but the ambient sound level still does not increase.

• The suits worn by the OWLF team would have to radiate heat somehow, otherwise the men wearing them would pass out from heat exhaustion within minutes.

• When the elevator Harrigan is hanging beneath begins to descend, he starts yelling at the occupants to stop it. The elevator clearly has an open cage gate instead of more modern sealed doors, which would mean Harrigan would almost certainly be audible to the people inside, but they do not react in any way to his frantic shouting.

Revealing Mistakes

• The air cannon and cables used to flip the exploding police car during the opening shootout are clearly visible. The car also has no engine, as daylight can be seen coming through the engine bay when it crashes back to the ground.

• When Danny shows Harrigan the dead Colombian hung from the ceiling, we hear him whistle as he indicates someone hauling the body up to the roof. However, his lips clearly aren't pursed for whistling at the time.

• After Harrigan elects to ignore orders and enter Vega's apartment, the camera pans across to follow him into the building, passing a reporter in the foreground whose lips clearly do not match the words we hear her saying.

• The film is set in Los Angeles, yet the subway seen is actually the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco. (Los Angeles did not actually have a subway network at the time the film was made, but coincidentally did by the year in which the film is set.)

• When Leona pulls the brakes on the subway train, the wheels can be seen sparking on the rails in closeup as it screeches to a halt. However, if you look carefully you can see the wheels are not actually turning at all — the train is already stationary, and the camera is simply panning along its length to give the impression is it slowing down. This is particularly noticeable in the final closeup of the wheels.

• As Harrigan sets off in pursuit of the Predator following the subway massacre, the shadow of an elevated camera and the man operating it are clearly visible on the ground to the left.

• The Predator's "UV vision" often detects things that aren't emitting ultraviolet light, most noticeably when Keyes is struggling to remove his suit helmet, revealing it is simply regular film footage that has been passed through some sort of filter.

• While Harrigan is fleeing from the departing Predator ship, the engines powering up in the background as he runs towards camera are clearly being portrayed by a bank of powerful lightbulbs being lifted into frame. The arrangement of the lights also does not match the engine configuration of the ship seen in previous shots.

• When the Predator ship's engines fire, the origin of the fiery blast does not align with the lights used to simulate the engines beforehand. In fact, as the explosion begins, the lights are artificially and somewhat awkwardly shifted across the screen to match where the flames come from, creating a strange and very obvious distortion.