The biggest plot holes

He wasn’t aware of that until just at the last moment, going over the legend on his head as I recall.

As I recall, the phone lines weren’t down the entire time.
There’s a scene where the bandits are robbing a house and a call goes through to the answering machine.
He also is able to use his phone to call the police later.
During this time, his mother is on the road, trying to return, so doesn’t try to call again.

A good story must makes sense in a way that the real world does not. Some true stories have been scaled back a bit because it was felt that audiences would not believe them (e.g., Hacksaw Ridge).

A film must present the audience with a functioning Rube-Goldberg machine. If it turns out that it was the Col. Mustard in the study with the lamp stick, then when we reflect on what we've been shown the clues had better be there to not only reveal that this was possible, but actually "fitting." Life falls under no such requirement. If it turns out our universe is a false-vacuum and that the whole universe is collapsing the speed of light, we will never know.

Indeed, some fictions attempt to provide explanations for happened in life's mysteries (e.g,. Star Trek TNG explains that Amelia Earheart was abducted by aliens), providing the closure that the real-world refuses us.

But suppose the hypothetical were actual. Would you say that Thelma and Louise 2 has a plot hole? Moreover, we have an actual example from The Rodent. Is that a plot hole or just bad writing? It is possible, after all, however implausible, that the swimming pools would happen to be built where no graves were to be found at any shallow depth.

Again, I understand the impulse to police boundaries to prevent mischief, but we should not let such an impulse unfairly rule out borderline cases in which what happens is not logically, or physically, or biologically impossible, but so implausible in terms of events as we know them that, for all practical purposes, reasonable viewers conclude that that could not or should not have happened.

Perhaps we can visit these ideas at a later time.

Nah. I'm good.

Nice examples. Good contrast. It is not impossible that an airport would not have enough sense to reroute planes to land at another airport, but it's so wrong in terms of what would be expected in the real world, that it just doesn't make sense. At a certain point, bad writing becomes so bad that we no longer say, "Well, that's lame." and instead say, "There's no bloody way that would have happened."

It's frustrating, because there will be borderline cases. We accept, for example, that street racers robbing truckers using the most dangerous and ineffective method imaginable in the original Fast and the Furious (i.e., using hopped up Toyotas to attack truckers, while they're in transit, to steal DVD players). This would not happen in the real world, but we accept it. The film meant to do this. The film appears to be winking at us a bit in terms of reality. This is not a reaction or side-effect that that does not make sense, but a direct main effect (It's not that they didn't think it out; they would not correct this if they were told of the "mistake"; rather it's that they were more concerned with getting a cool action scene than with real life). I would not call this a plot hole, but rather bad writing. On the other hand, I think you have a definite plot hole with Die Hard 2. Someone in the writer's room should have caught that and they should have gone another round. At bottom, I'd rather have tough borderline cases than an overly restrictive definition.

Well actually I asked a person I know about the Die Hard 2 plot hole and she emailed me back saying that the planes could not fly to other airports because they needed the airport to tell them where other planes were in the sky, which they airport could tell them because the terrorists took it over. But couldn't the planes have just gotten that information on where other planes are in the sky from another airport?

Why would Auric Goldfinger reveal Operation GrandSlam to all those businessmen if he just planned to kill them anyways

Some plot holes are editing holes where a scene used to be (e.g., how did she know his name?, how did he know they were going to X?). Many bad films that studies have tried to "save in the edit" are rife with them. Basically, a character appears to lack information that would allow them to move the plot forward. This, of course, raises the question of how much we should assume is happening off-screen (e.g., we don't have to be shown the "drive to work" to figure out that Chet somehow got there). An amusing aspect of Planet Terror is that Rodriguez cut out some formal tissue that is pretty standard that creates a winking edit (we're suppose to assume a missing reel, and we already know what is happening). This is not a plot hole, but clever story telling.

The upshot here is that, in part, what constitutes a plot hole has to do with the "grammar" of filmmaking (We want to know how Character X knows of character Y, whom she has ever met, but we don't care that we're not shown how she got to work). Once again, we find that a plot hole is not simply a violation of what is logical possible, but rather a sort of violation of audience expectation relative to a norm.

Would this also be a plot hole in Die Hard...

Nah, that's just a bad decision on Hans's part. Bad decisions are different from plot holes. Something like that could still happen in the film world based on the established rules given to us.

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For the lulz

Hans is under pressure in a fluid situation and he is experimenting with McClain, playing a chess game with him. He's weighing options and trying to keep his own people in line. I don't think that this is a plot hole. It's both plausible and possible.

And it was not too long afterward that John sent the detonators down the elevator shaft, right?

That stated, what if Hans had just started plugging a hostage every two minutes until he got his detonators (before John detonated them)? We might agree with Robinson (Paul Gleason) that John was letting people die if he made good on his threat and John still did not comply.

Oh okay, I thought Hans people would agree to kill hostages to get them though, and therefore his men would still be kept in line.

John drops the C4 (with only four of the detonators, not all of them) down the elevator shaft before the Ellis negotiation scene, not after - Hans recovers the rest of the detonators during the "shoot the glass" scene and eventually uses them to blow up the roof. Besides, Hans also can't risk shooting too many hostages because a) they're his only leverage against the cops and b) he needs to have them die in the roof explosion as part of his original plan, so once he figures that John won't give himself up to save Ellis (and presumably not give in after even more executions) then it's the better move to go back to chasing down the detonators as quickly as possible.

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Does this count as a plot hole in Robocop?

Nope, Bobby died from the impact and probably from shock.
If you watch, he goes limp while on the bonnet of the car.

You could argue he simply passed out, but Murphy and Lewis also just left him in the road so if the initial shock and impact didn't kill him, he probably bled out in the road as no medic was called for him.

Edit: Also, let's say Bobby hadn't died... the future portrayed in RoboCop, the authorities aren't gonna cut deals with a criminal under any circumstance.
As shown in the police station with Sgt Reed when the two lawyers try to cut a deal with their client's bail... Reed simply grabs them by the neck and tells them to get out of his station.
Also, Clarence and his goons are well known to the cops anyway, they just haven't been able to stop them yet.

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He's just a psycho with the gold market in his gold colored back pockets.

Why would you assume that? Not only is he bleeding out, he gets thrown from the van into the police car and bounces off onto the road during a high-speed pursuit - the odds of him surviving all that are virtually non-existent, especially considering that Murphy and Lewis are too busy with the chase to either check on him or call for an ambulance (and, considering that the world of RoboCop is so dysfunctional that the police are contemplating a strike, it stands to reason that Detroit's medical services might not be too useful anyway). So it makes more sense to assume that the guy just dies.

Oh okay, good point that he could be dead from the impact. But also, it's just that Detroit's medical survices were able to save Murphy, after he had been shot so many times, and shot in the head, so the medical survices were top notch. Sure he was not very alive, but enough to remember and things and function to a degree. So I thought the medical responses were top notch.

Also, in this bad future, how is that the prosecution can afford not to make deals? If they don't make deals, that means every criminal has to go to trial, which costs a lot more. Could they afford that in this future, and afford not to make deals? Wouldn' this mean the courts are top notch as well, if they can afford to prosecute all the criminals without making deals?

It just seems kind of inconsistent because it's suppose to be dystopian and run down, yet the medical services and the courts are top notch it seems.

He also built a pretty sweet model. He had to show it somebody.