- Payne is watching a football game on television while everything is going down. What football game is being played in the middle of the day on a weekday?
The Super Bowl would not be played on a weekday though..it would be on a Sunday, and in the evening. The Super Bowl in 1994 kicked off at 6:20pm EST, 3:20pm on the west coast.
- Is it explicitly a weekday? Santa Barbara and Los Angeles are busy enough cities to have people commuting to jobs on a Satuday or Sunday morning. As for the game- it seems most likely that he's watching a college game, since Paine recognizes Annie's University of Arizona jacket and drops a Wildcats reference. He served on the police force in Atlanta, so if the movie is taking place on a Saturday, he could be watching an east coast game with a noon kickoff at 9am in LA. The team he seems to be rooting for is wearing dark blue jerseys and dull gold helmets, so it could very well be Georgia Tech, which ties back in with his Atlanta roots.
- Harry figures out the identity of the bomber as Howard Payne. Howard knows that the police now know who he is. If this is the case, how does he expect to get away with his crime ? Even if he got the money (without a dye pack in it) how did he ever expect to spend it ? Law enforcement everywhere knows exactly who he is and what he looks like. No matter where he went he would be apprehended if he ever attempted to spend that money. Not to mention the serial numbers on the bills will certainly be recorded as well.
- It's perhaps a bit of a pat answer, but Howard is clearly a few nails short of a full bag, so to speak. He appears to have focussed more on setting up the crime than planning what came next.
- I dare say he was probably planning on hopping the next flight out of the jurisdiction to a place without extradition to the United States which would be happy to set up a bank account with American dollars, no questions asked. Also, let's face it — if he was that concerned by the possibility of getting caught he, well, wouldn't be planning a major terrorist strike to begin with. I think we have to chalk this up to Rule of Drama meets a Hand Wave along the line of "He's probably gone some kind of plan for this, we just don't see it because it never comes up."
- His exit strategy likely involved faking his death by killing some poor soul and taking a boat or driving out of the country. Those two years of planning likely included knowing where to go to deposit the money and live out his days without fear of being tracked down. When the elevator job had gone south, his plans were disrupted, but most of it involving his exit strategy remained in place and sound since his encounter with Jack didn't expose them. So, finding a new target, building the devices and planting them wouldn't have taken very long to setup.
- The bomber wants three million dollars and the entire film is spent avoiding giving him this money. Considering the vast amount of damage done in this movie ( The bus hitting the plane and exploding, the subway crash) this amounts to far more than three million dollars of damage. They would have been better off giving the guy his money.
- Well, they're obviously not going to just give him three million dollars without at least a token effort of catching him, since (a) they're the police, they want to arrest this guy for breaking the law, (b) giving in to his demands is likely going to encourage him and others to try this sort of thing again, and (c) it's heavily implied (and even if they don't know this for certain, the police certainly have to consider the possibility) that as soon as he gets the money, he's going to kill everyone anyway, meaning they've just given him three million dollars in exchange for him killing a whole bunch of people. In strictly financial terms it's costing them more, perhaps, but there are clearly more priorities going on here than just the strictly financial. There are things more important here than money, basically.
- Won't get into anything concerning the bus (as Roger Ebert said concerning the freeway jump, this is a movie where you don't ask those types of questions), but where the heck was Jack heading atop the train? Especially with Payne in the same car as the motorman's cab (which Payne obviously had a good view of), there wasn't anywhere Jack could sneak into and catch an armed Payne (with a dead-man's-switch bomb to boot) by surprise.
- The entire train sequence doesn't make much sense, seeing as how subways can be stopped remotely by simply killing the power.
- Also, Harry is walking with a cane during and after the award ceremony - but the very next day he's perfectly capable of running?
- It's implied that some time has passed by between the first act and the main act. Jack is taken by surprise at the mad bomber coming back at him, and it assumedly must have taken weeks for Payne to put his diabolical plan in motion, unless he had already set it up as backup plan for the elevator job.
- Although this troper has always linked Harry's hangover in the station with the one he received at the party. Plus when Jack gets his coffee it is explained that 'he was up all night partying'.
- Fair point, but as is said above Jack is taken by surprise when Payne calls him on the payphone, plus later in the film when Jack is explaining what's happening to Annie he says that "a while back" Payne held some people hostage. Incidentally, even if some time has elapsed, it's still possible Payne was working on the bus job at the same time as the elevator job in case the latter failed as one of the above tropers said. After all, he said he spent two years preparing the elevator job, and it is almost certainly not two years later when the rest of the film takes place.
- Awards ceremonies don't happen overnight. It could have been the better part of a year before they received their medals. So everyone is correct in that: A. Lots of time has passed and B. They are all hungover from the awards ceremony.
- Adrenaline.
- Surely someone was killed when the exploding bus demolished the plane?
- its been a while since I've seen it but I'm pretty sure they show that the plane was getting towed and that the guy driving the tow truck was running away from the wreckage.
- Wouldn't Helen grab one of the two bars that are shown on the side instinctively as she felt the step under her feet dissolve?
- Helen was too distracted by the prospect of getting to safety, and the explosion suprised and confused for her to grab the bars in time.
- I know movies like this are supposed to end with the male and female leads making out, but Jack's best friend just got killed hours earlier. Shouldn't he slightly give a damn? All I ask is one Hand Wave line, "Harry would've wanted this."
- There is the scene earlier in the bus where Jack basically explodes with fury and grief with the news, so it's not like it's just brushed away entirely. In any case, if I'd had a long day of being trapped on various forms of public transport with bombs and hostages and lunatics, and someone was offering me a bout of intense Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex in my near future as a consequence, I'm not entirely sure I'd respond with "Hang on, I just have to bring up my dead workmate a bit more first."
- The other messed-up thing is that a gathered crowd starts cooing over the two lovebirds, despite the fact that the poor murdered conductor's body is only a few feet away from them. It seems like if you're not one of the leads, then you don't matter in-story or out.
- For this particular one, the people around the train simply might not have seen the dead conductor. It's dark in the train, the front has presumably been smashed up a bit, and his body might have slid into a position where it's not easily seen. It's not like they're making out on top of his corpse.
- What would Payne have done if the bus got in a traffic jam (and thus exploded) before the ransom was delivered? Would he just say "oh well", and dream up a new ransom plot later?
- Why not? He only tagged the bus because the elevator job failed. He clearly has no problem in killing any number of people.
- After everything Jack does to board the bus he finally gets on and announces that he is a cop and there is a bomb on the bus. One of the passengers says something like "Oh yeah sure! Some joke man!" Seriously..he saw Jack risk life and limb to get on the bus as it was in motion and he honestly thinks he did it all for the sake of a joke??
- Some people can be in denial and jumping onto a bus from a moving vehicle is pretty extreme and not something you see happen every day.
- Why was Payne, an ex-cop specializing in bomb disposal (and thus, had likely been up close with negotiation and ransom delivery procedures), surprised to find his money had been tampered with? You don't even need to be an ex-cop to figure they tend not to just pay up and let you walk away.
- I don't know exactly when they introduced dye packs as an anti-robbery device, but since Payne is retired they might have started using them after he left the job, so he might not be aware of them.
- Payne did, however, have Annie empty the bag the money came in and put it in another bag. If there was a dye pack or tracker, he thought it would be left behind. Only Annie either missed it or she knowingly transferred the dye pack into the bag to screw him. Since Jack was there, Howard was watching him instead of Annie, so she would've had the opportunity.
- The "looped video" bit is best when not examined too closely. The signal is broadcast by the news van, but the original video feed (coming from the bus camera) is theoretically still broadcasting - Payne should have had some visual interference with two signals coming in to his monitor at once. The movie didn't say anything about the police disabling the original video feed from the bus, but Payne having a backup plan for everything you would assume either he had a system for setting off the bomb if the video was tampered with, or the police didn't want to tamper with it for fear Payne would set the bomb off himself.
- Just after they pull the looped video trick there's a shot of Payne leaving the bathroom in his flat, so presumably he missed the interference of the two signals while he was in the bathroom (granted, it's still a Contrived Coincidence).
