Goofs for
Clear and Present Danger (1994)

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• Continuity: The printer bay that Jack opens is shut after he finds some paper. When he finally puts the paper in, we see there was paper there all along.
  
  
• Continuity: When Jack refills the printer with paper, he never closes the paper tray.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: As the rescue helicopter approaches the village to pick up Clark, Ryan, and the prisoners, a reflection of the crew's helicopter is briefly visible in its side window.
  
  

• Revealing mistakes: When multiple US Chevy Suburbans are ambushed from a rooftop, a rocket propelled grenade that hits a windshield travels along a visible guide wire.
  
  
• Continuity: When Jack drives the truck backwards through the wall during the ambush scene, he gets in the drivers seat without putting on his seatbelt. We then see the stunt double wearing a seatbelt in the long shot, but in the close-up, Jack is again unbuckled.
  
  
• Continuity: In the beginning of the film, the Coast Guard cutter is pursuing the Enchanter in seas that are at least 10 to 15 feet. Yet when the small boat is deployed to board the Enchanter, the ocean is flat calm.
  
  
• Factual errors: The skipper of the Coast Guard cutter is wearing the Officer Corps emblem on her ballcap. Officers in the Coast Guard always wear their rank devices on their ballcaps.
  
  
• Errors in geography: When Clark is trying to get hold of the team from his hotel room in Colombia, you can clearly see out the window a billboard that says "Colosio", a Mexican presidential candidate.
  
  
• Errors in geography: The picture on the wall when Ryan visits his house to prove Cortez's foul play, is of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a prominent XIX century Mexican politician (the action supposedly takes place in Colombia.)
  
  
• Continuity: During the Cortez/Cutter conversation in the Panama hotel room, Cortez says, "No more senseless violence, you'll have your victory." When Ryan plays the tape to distract Cortez, the tape has Cortez saying, "No more violence," missing out on the "senseless".
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: A distressing number of viewers have failed to realize that Jack is a pet name for John.
  
  
• Errors in geography: After the ambush in Colombia, European-style Doppler sirens are heard. All Latin American police uses American-made klaxon sirens.
  
  
• Continuity: In the beginning of the film, two Coast Guardsmen are sent to man the forward gun. As they leave the hatch, the first is wearing an orange jacket while the second wears an orange vest over a dark blue shirt. In the next shot as they move forward along the rail, the man in the orange jacket is now behind the man in the vest. In the next shot as they approach the gun, both are now wearing orange vests over dark blue shirts. Next, we see a tighter shot as the man in the orange jacket mans the gun, followed by a longer shot where both are now back to wearing the vests.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When you see the scene with 'Clark' and 'Ritter' talking about incursions into Columbia, a giveaway that the scene is in Mexico is the VW bug on the street behind them.
  
  
• Factual errors: Jack Ryan is told not to lower the window of the Suburban while en route. The windows of such armored vehicles do not lower.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When the US squad is ambushed, the point man who was a mile away rushes back. In the scene that he first views the enemy over his squad mates, He hunkers down behind a rock supposedly at a sufficient distance he remains undetected. Unfortunately, for a couple of seconds an enemy soldier is visible moving up and down on the rocks directly behind him.
  
  
• Factual errors: In the scene where Jack has access to Ritter's computer, Jack is seen viewing and printing files. Then Ritter discovers Jack's diversionary phone call, so Ritter begins to delete the same files from the disk, and eventually clears the screen of the file Jack was accessing. Disk operating systems of all kinds do not allow an open file, the file jack was printing, to be deleted; thus, Jack should have been able to keep the file open as long as he wanted to and print or copy to another disk to use as evidence against Ritter. Furthermore, Ritter would have received an error message on his computer like, "CANNOT DELETE FILE--FILE IN USE", or some similar message, and not a "Deleting files *.*" message for the duration. The fact that the printer Jack was using ran out of paper is irrelevant.
  
  
• Factual errors: After Petey is assigned his "special program" to break into Ritter's computer, he is seen typing a code that is non-functional. He is assigning constant values to a character variable that is 13 digits long, which is a base 10 number so large that a computer at that time could not possibly address it or store it in memory, and, furthermore, there is no known computer language that includes two equals signs as modals between the variable (e.g., "x") and the numeric constant--the assigned number; only one equals sign is used to assign variables, regardless of the computer language or platform. What is shown is all gibberish.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: When the President and Cutter are alone in the conference room talking about their "little war" and Cutter suggests, "I think it's time the whole thing went away," the President replies, "Then it should go away. It never happened..." to which Cutter replies, "Yes, sir", but Cutter's lips don't move.
  
  
• Factual errors: The apparent 'supercomputer/codebreaker' that Petey uses to hack into Ritter's system is actually the Iceberg system, a tape backup library made by StorageTek that includes magnetic tape cartridges and a robotic arm to retrieve the cartridges and load into a tape drive. So unless Ritter saved his password on a hard drive and it was backed up to a tape cartridge, this data storage system would not help Petey hack into Ritter's system.
  
  

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