I'm sorry, but for the one cop (the black male detective) to piece together almost the entire plan in about 10-15 minutes after seeing a mostly blank and obscure wall in John's abandoned house.......... c'mon.
Hollywood or not, that was simply ridiculous. Was he psychic? An uber-genius? Nah..... just a Pittsburgh cop.
Still a decent movie though.
Considering that he'd been trying to piece everything together anyway, the wall just helped clarify things.
Life, every now and then, behaves as though it had seen too many bad movies
In reality yes. It's almost impossible for cops to find your clues at the first place or even follow them to fall into your trap. But remember it was really critical for this movie to keep the pace at that point.
They just needed to tell the airport security if they didn't want to have a suspension at the end, that's it.
But I partly agree with you. Weird thing is that the house was empty and it's not odd to find a wall like that in any empty houses.
The cop piecing together the puzzle so fast was definitely a plot point that took away from this movie for me (among other points). He could have been lucky once or twice but it was getting far fetched there at the end. like when he was chasing after a freaking subway train on foot. Really!?
shareHe was chasing the subway on foot cause he had ordered it to be stopped, and as you saw he just missed them barely going through the fence John had cut. So to me that was pretty real, he wanted to be right there when it stopped which he expected it to do immediately.
shareWhen I read the title of this thread, I thought you were talking about the white guy detective who went to the scene of the wife's supposed crime three years after the fact and figured out what really happened after ten minutes of squatting with a thoughtful look on his face.
Or how he knew when the other two detectives brought the garbage bag into the that it contained clues relevant to the case he just happened to be thinking about at the moment. He and his partner were the only ones to go and help look.
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Well hell then, I guess I need my pants.
He didn't "figure out" what happened when he was sitting there. We the audience are shown what really happened that night in this scene. He is shown thinking, remembering the wife's statement about the button. At this point he feels she very well could have been innocent, with the escape, John's determination and huge risk taking. He goes back just to take a look for his peace of mind so to speak. Then the thought of figuring, "maybe there really was truth to what she was saying" If there really was a "button" could it have washed away? Did we really investigate through all possibilities 3 years ago?"
As far as the bag not sure what you are saying? Of course they are going to look for any evidence, garbage is always a big clue, John knew this, that's why he mislead them. I think you may have missed the scene where the black woman cop asked him to join the investigation, and told him about the escape? He didn't just "happen to be thinking about this case." He was also there the first morning they came to the house and arrested Laura, and also was suspicious when John was questioned about the bump key, remember he saw him getting sick, then sat outside his house in the car? He was pretty much always involved in this case.
The only reason the detectives even looked in the garbage bags was because they broke into johns house and only after that did they find suspicious tape remaining on the wall. The idea that a detective is going to get a warrant to search the husband of a convicted criminal after so many years of her already being in prison because they drive the same car that was found to be at a meth lab the night before?!?! Not another single thing linked them and this guys like yeah JT was definitely this guy get a warrant I'll break in. It's legit ludicrous, I really like this movie too but after re watching that whole sequence it bothered me a lot because it couldn't make any less sense.
Still a good movie though
When they found out that the white palace was in Haiti and didn't find them on the plane to Haiti. Someone in the room where the clues were taped the wall said, " Do you wonder why we found this particular bag?" and the black detective responded with, "And he's a school teacher?" I took that Russell Crowe had carefully planned for them to "find" this bag. So not a plot hole at all. Actually showed him being a step ahead.
shareThis movie was just not that good. I couldn't even remember what it was had to go back and look at the synopsis. For me this was a big time forgetful movie, I will probably never watch this one again even if it's on free tv
sharehe IS a detective you know ..
...a Detective Lieutenant in a metro city has quite a bit of experience and he IS paid to DETECT!
..They have actual cop schools that teach effective police work too.
I don't think the intelligence of the cop was a stretch so much as the character was poorly developed. The reason why I didn't like that part of the movie was this cop shows up at an arson scene at a meth lab and within hours is at the guys house the following morning piecing together the entire puzzle, and pretty much becoming the antagonist and driving the plot of the movie.
I agree it was necessary to keep the pacing in this genre of movie but maybe this detective should have been introduced earlier in the film in order to make these events more realistic and to flesh out the character a little bit more.
Detectives work on these kinds of cases for months and most of the time, years. He didn't even know John or Lara's names, he even refers to them to his partner with a phrase something along the lines of "does that murderer have a husband?". Minutes later they're at his house breaking in with a credit card. Cops don't just enter empty houses without a search warrant just because nobody is home at the time.
Especially considering there's no way any of the evidence from the meth lab was even close to being processed, they wouldn't even consider coming after their suspect in that manner. The legal processes that revolve around investigating and questioning suspects let alone making an arrest are much more complex and time consuming than this movie makes them out to be. On television cop dramas, evidence takes hours to process, in real life DNA will be at the lab for months.
But I suppose if you think too much about these things you'll realize theres no way a (I counted at least 5 or 6 people in the opening scene and possible more) team of cops would bust into a middle class white family's home while they eat breakfast and forcefully arrest a housewife without so much as calling any suspects into the police station for questioning first. So the best approach is to just take these events with a suspension of disbelief and just enjoy the movie.
i thought tying the arson to the breakout at the hospital was really far-fetched ... i can suspend disbelief for awhile but that stuck out as being way to convenient for the cop to make the connection.
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Reality is subjective.
What? I'm sorry, but you stupid people didn't pay attention. If you look closely, you can see the script on the floor near the left. I think he picked it up and read the script. Next time actually watch the movie before you come on imdb bitching up a storm. Jesus.
sharethe whole thing was a huge plot device to create suspension. There's no way the evidence they had would have been enough for them to track him down so fast.
And then there's no way they would have tried to shutdown an entire to city to try to track down a soccer mom who escaped from prison with her husband who killed some drug dealers who nobody would miss.
I'm amazed that from a broken tail light they were able to narrow down to a suspect in less than a day. They said there were 1000 Prius' registered in the city, and found two convicted felons owned them. One was a rapist in a wheelchair and the other a woman with life imprisonment. So they immediately targeted the woman's husband as the most plausible suspect? They didn't consider the possibility that the person who did this wasn't a convicted felon, or maybe the car wasn't registered to them?
shareHe was certainly brighter than most, and that's how it is in the real world as well. Some people are more resilient and intuitive, and more able to connect the dots. He knew John's wife was convicted of murder, but not under what circumstances. For all he knew, John's wife had been involved in drugs. After the super-cop had checked out the other major felon, it's perfectly reasonable to look into John as well. The wall in John's house was far from "blank and obscure", as it had remains of paper all over it. Clearly something had been pinned all over the wall, and since most people don't pin stuff directly on to their walls, it was at least worth checking out.
share