The Transporter goofs

During Frank's discussion with Inspector Tarconi, the inspector refers to his car as a 1999 black BMW 765, yet when Frank mentions it he calls it a 735. Tarconi admits he can no longer keep track of every detail, so the inconsistency could simply be an honest mistake.

Frank drives back to his home with Lai in the stolen Mercedes. The next day, Wall Street's henchmen turn up at the property and demolish it. How did they manage to pinpoint his secret lair? Did it not occur to Frank that a top-of-the-range Mercedes might be fitted with a tracker? For someone so meticulous, it was a rather foolish oversight.

Frank's line of work involves moving items without asking any questions. Yet at the start of the film he is serving as the getaway driver for a gang of bank robbers. His trade is intended to be highly discreet, so he would normally steer clear of becoming involved in such a risky venture.

Frank is portrayed as a meticulous individual and a highly skilled driver. Yet his getaway driving at the start of the film nearly ends in catastrophe: he is surrounded by police and only escapes by steering his car off a bridge and onto a passing car transporter. He could not have foreseen that, so his escape was purely down to luck.

When the BMW gets a flat tyre, it is fitted with a non-standard alloy wheel. In the following scene, the original alloy wheel is back on the car.

During the lorry chase, the convoy repeatedly travels the same stretch of motorway.

Towards the end, Lai's father and his driver unexpectedly reappear, even though there was no feasible way for them to have arrived so swiftly. The driver had lost consciousness, yet he was back a short while later.

In several scenes the BMW's seats alternate between standard and upmarket versions, evident from the different headrests.

At the beginning of the 'oil' sequence in the bus depot, one of the earliest attackers on Frank already has oil on his top before anyone else falls into the oil (this is presumably from an earlier take).

As Frank drives through the property's gates to make his getaway, the Mercedes' grille and indicator are still in place. In the following shot they are hanging off.

The BMW leaping from the bridge sports tinted side windows.

When Frank and Lai flee the burning house via the cellar exit, they dive into the water. Frank surfaces wearing diving kit, but Lai never dons any fins. Yet in the subsequent shots where she is diving and clambering out of the water, she is shown with fins on.

Before Frank's car leaps from the bridge during the opening chase, three cars are lined up one behind the other on the lorry, but after the lorry passes beneath the bridge their order has been altered.

Early in the film Frank's BMW is shown flipping its front number plate to display a different registration. Shortly afterwards, when Frank is shown changing the front number plate in his garage, the car has a standard number plate mounting and an ordinary number plate, which would make such a flipping mechanism impossible.

In the first car chase, as Frank is driving on the pavement, he passes a restaurant while a blue-clad copper chasing alongside crashes through the tables and chairs – a man jumps out of the way towards the centre posts, facing away from the camera – in the 'cool repeated action' shot he is facing the camera.

When Lai tumbles down the hill after being released from the boot, she is wearing flats; yet later, when Frank discovers her in the rear of the Mercedes and sets her down on the pavement, she is wearing heels.

After the scuffle in the oil, Frank swims away from the assailants and then makes his way back to the garage. His trousers are entirely dry, not a single oil stain to be seen.

Lai has a prominent spot in the centre of her forehead that repeatedly appears and disappears throughout the film.

In certain shots the BMW is fitted with a rain sensor, while in others it isn't.

Near the end of the opening car chase, the Transporter's BMW wing mirror vanishes in one shot, only to reappear in the next.

In the scenes where Frank uses a stethoscope to listen "into" the containers, the instrument suddenly vanishes as he walks round one container towards another. He hadn't had time to remove it.

In the closing moment of the first chase on the pier, Frank steps over the railway immediately after a train has gone past, leaving the police officers stranded on the opposite side. Seconds later one officer crosses the railway and runs through the warehouse on foot in an attempt to shoot the BMW, but by then the train has already come to a stop.

Before driving the BMW off the bridge, Frank transfers his right foot from the brakes to the accelerator. However, immediately beforehand the rear wheels are seen spinning on the road, indicating he must already have been applying the accelerator.

During the first chase scene involving the police officer in the blue Peugeot, after smashing through the plastic furniture on the pavement, the officer's licence plate is partly hanging off. In the next shot, when the officer nearly collides with a motorised pole, the licence plate has returned to its normal position.

When Kwai appears at the doorway of the articulated lorry and trains his pistol on Frank, the pistol's cocking is audible. However, in the subsequent shot the pistol is not cocked.

Towards the film's finale, during a car and lorry pursuit, one of the Mercedes crashes and skids across the motorway. It initially sports gleaming alloy wheels, but when it is in flames it is fitted with steel rims rather than alloys.

When Lai's father enters the room (just before he slaps her) the guard at the door can be seen placing a beer bottle down. However, prior to the father's entrance the guard is not holding a beer bottle.

Lai's hair looked fairly straight when she was shown bound and gagged in Wall Street's cellar. In the next scene, when Frank takes her to his flat later that evening, her hair is noticeably curlier. She would not have had the opportunity to fix it, as she was restrained the entire time.

When Frank returns to seek revenge for blowing up his BMW, he crashes through the wooden gate and the Mercedes he's driving ends up with a damaged grille — yet in the first shot after he breaks through the grille appears intact, becoming damaged only in the following shots.

When Lai is seated at the table with a drink in her hands and her father slaps her, the cup and its contents topple to the right. In the next shot of the table, the cups that had been on the right and the spillage are shown on the left. In the final shot the spill is back on the right again, yet the cup has moved closer to Lia's hands without being touched. Also, she begins to spill the drink before he strikes her, even though she does not actually move until he does.

After Wall Street suffocates his man in the hospital, the following shot still reveals the actor's pulse in the man's throat, despite the heart monitor showing a flat line.

In the opening chase, as Frank reverses the BMW off the car transporter, the left-hand door mirror strikes a support column for the trailer decks and is pushed forward; a split second later, as the BMW drives off, the mirror has returned to its normal position.

During the opening pursuit sequence, the Transporter's BMW number plates repeatedly alternate between white and yellow and back to white.

Length of Tarconi's cigarette while he speaks with Frank and Lai in his office after the house has been demolished.

When Frank returns to Wall Street's house to take his revenge, the sky outside is overcast. Yet just five minutes later, as he leaves, the sky is clear and sunny.

During the scuffle at Wall Street's mansion, Frank disarms a henchman wielding a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun, fires its rounds into the ceiling until it is empty and then drops the spent weapon. In the next scene he walks into the garage holding a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver that seems to have materialised out of nowhere.

The tape over Lai's mouth repeatedly alternates between being cut and uncut.

He picks up a crate containing three empty bottles. In the subsequent shot, as he walks off, he is carrying the same crate, but it now contains six bottles that appear to be full.

After the first car chase, when Frank is hanging the number plates at his villa he removes a white plate; however, when he puts it into the toolbox it appears yellow like the others.

Whilst the inspector is speaking to Frank in the cell, his firearm is plainly pinning his jacket back, yet in a different shot, even though he hasn't moved, the jacket is hanging loose.

When Frank gives Lai a bowl of ramen for dinner, he sticks the chopsticks into the bowl. Whilst he leaves the room and the camera cuts to Lai seated at the table, the chopsticks are seen lying across the bowl before she picks them up to start eating.

In the scene where Frank takes a rifle into the shipyard, the rifle’s stock is shown folded. He fires a few rounds at a couple of men while it remains folded. After a few shots the stock is unfolded and Frank uses it as it is meant to be used.

In the motorway action sequence, when Frank kicks the driver out of the lorry and the door comes off and flies across the road, it's clearly a dummy.

During the struggle between Frank and Wall Street in the lorry's cab — particularly when Wall Street is about to kick Frank through the windscreen — a driver's hands can be seen on the steering wheel in exterior shots.

Moments before Frank's BMW explodes, the collar of his white shirt is visible as he approaches the car. At the instant the vehicle detonates and Frank is lifted off the ground, his coat is pulled up and conceals his white shirt collar, and the harness (used to hoist him off his feet) is visible beneath his jacket at shoulder height.

The camera's reflection is visible on the Mercedes' rear bumper while Frank is reversing, after he decides against leaving Lai in the street.

You needn't be on the road from the dead of night until sunrise to drive from Marseilles to Lyon.

Frank is instructed to deliver the package (with Lai) to "Rue de Luxembourg", yet upon leaving the property's gates the street sign reads "Avenue de Saissy", which is the street's actual name in Cannes, France.

It's simply impossible to hot‑wire a modern S‑Class Mercedes by pulling a handful of wires out from beneath the dashboard and twisting some of them together.

At the start of the bank robbery, one of the robbers shoots another to satisfy Frank’s condition that he only transport three people. However, the blood spatter on the rear windscreen implies an exit wound — if the bullet exited, it should have passed through the back windscreen as well.

Frank is covered in oil; he dives into the water and the oil is washed off him. Water cannot do that.

Two 40 ft by 8 ft containers would not be sufficient to accommodate 400 people.

When Frank raids Wall Street's villa to exact revenge, he drops behind a door lying detached on the ground to shield himself from the assailants' gunfire. In reality, bullets would readily pass through a wooden door, making it ineffective as protection against firearms. This, however, could be explained if the door had a solid steel core; given the homeowner's criminal background, it is quite plausible he would have such a reinforced door.

Vehicles transported on a carrier are fastened to the trailer with chains. Carrying an unsecured load is against the law. Simply lowering the ramp will not cause the vehicle to roll off the trailer.

Each time Lai speaks Mandarin, the Fox DVD subtitles mistakenly label her dialogue as "Speaking in Japanese", an error compounded by the subtitles also stating that her character "comes from Japan".

When Frank leaps onto the top of the container being carried by the forklift, the entire unit visibly wobbles. An empty 20-foot cargo container weighs about 4,850 lb, and the forklift is at least three times heavier. A 200 lb man could not generate that much movement simply by landing on it.

During the aeroplane/lorry chase sequence, the aircraft is shown extremely low in one shot and then, in the very next, high enough for Frank to skydive. There's no way a Cessna could gain altitude that quickly.

When Frank uses a stethoscope to listen to the cargo containers, he has the earpieces the wrong way round. The tubing ought to be directed into his ear canals, rather than towards the backs of his ears.

At 01:19:12 (when Frank lands on the lorry with a parachute) the car that the parachute lands on collides with another car, and the two vehicles crash in an explosion. If you pause the film you can see they explode just before the collision. Those cars shouldn't be able to explode at all (otherwise Mercedes would be out of business).

When Frank's home is attacked, even though the assailants are firing high‑powered assault rifles fully automatically while standing, there appears to be virtually no recoil — all the rounds hit Frank's home at approximately the same height. Given the distance and the manner of fire, that level of consistency simply wouldn't be feasible, however skilled the marksman.

When Frank falls backwards through the truck's windscreen, the glass disintegrates into thousands of tiny fragments, which indicates it is toughened (tempered) safety glass — a material that has not been used for windscreens since the 1980s. A windscreen is a type of safety glazing composed of two sheets of glass bonded with a plastic interlayer, referred to as laminated glass. Although laminated glass is not as strong as toughened or tempered glass, it does not shatter into small pieces; instead it cracks on one or both sides of the plastic film and remains largely in place. The truck's windscreen should have been laminated safety glass and therefore would have stayed intact, albeit badly cracked.

After the lorry's manoeuvres on the motorway, the container would be filled with battered, unconscious and dead people.

In France, patrol vehicles are labelled "Gendarmerie" rather than "Police".

Frank has no trouble hot-wiring Wall Street's Mercedes. A top-of-the-range car such as this would be fitted with an immobiliser and could not be hot-wired in the manner Frank demonstrates.

Shipping containers lack handrails around the top and typically have no ladders attached to the sides.

Frank and Lai enter Wall Street's office, where Frank disarms him and holds him at gunpoint with Wall Street's own pistol. Unfortunately, the weapon is plainly a Bruni 8mm blank-firing pistol. It is doubtful that Wall Street would have armed himself with a starting pistol.

When Frank leaps onto the bicycle pedals to snap them off the crankset, it would be extremely difficult to accomplish. The pedal spindle is solid steel and is at least 1/2" or 9/16" thick. Yes, they can break, but it would require far more force than he exerted. They would have had to be deliberately weakened or rigged to fail so readily and cleanly for that to occur.

When Frank uses bicycle pedals during the fight, metal pedals of this kind would skid across a smooth concrete surface, particularly if the floor were genuinely covered in oil. He wouldn't have any control or traction during the fight.

After firing up Wall Street's Mercedes, Frank drives it straight through the garage door and the mansion's gates. Fortunately for him, they appear to be made of plywood. Had they been constructed from any kind of hardwood, the car would very likely have been wrecked and he could have been unable to get away. Opening the garage door and gates might have been the more sensible option, but it wouldn't have looked nearly as impressive.

After fleeing Wall Street's mansion, Frank discovers Lai in the rear of the vehicle, still tied to a chair. He leaves her at the side of the road and drives away. She is gagged and producing muffled noises; somehow those sounds remain audible to Frank as he pulls away in the car. He could not possibly have heard them.

When Frank's house is being fired upon, one of the weapons shown is an Aug-Steyr chambered in 5.56 mm (.223). A .223 round would not bore through stone walls as depicted and still inflict such massive internal damage; in fact, it is highly doubtful it would even penetrate the masonry.

At 5.11 the car chase proceeds along a road that is clearly marked with the sign 'T', indicating it is a no through road.

Many viewers complain about apparent continuity errors. In reality, the film's editing frequently uses a technique known as "time squeeze" to speed up the unfolding of the action. In such sequences minor moments are omitted (for example: paying for a drink, donning fins, removing a stethoscope, extending the rifle's stock, the arrival of Lai's father's car in the final sequence, and so forth).

The opening credits list the film as "In Association with Current Entertainement and Canal +", with 'Entertainement' misspelt.

Lai is bound to a chair, her wrists and ankles secured. She somehow reaches the car by walking on tiptoe. How, then, does she open the door, haul herself and the chair into the vehicle and close the door behind her? And that’s before you consider how someone as meticulous as Frank can drive off with the car without noticing a woman tied to an office chair in the back seat.

When Frank dashes up to the crop-duster with his aeroplane in the field, the crop-duster greets him "good morning" in English, despite Frank a) being in France and b) not having said a word to reveal he was English.

While Frank is driving the lorry, he holds a shard of a mirror to view behind him. Yet the sunlight glancing onto his face suggests the shard was angled towards the sun rather than at whatever he was "looking at".

No explanation was offered as to what became of the other lorry involved in human trafficking.

Following the oil fight, when Frank plunges through the window into the water, the shot from the water of his landing shows a stuntman with a full head of hair, even though Frank is almost entirely bald.

After Frank drops Lai off and pulls over for a snack, his BMW is blown up. The blast throws Frank backwards and upwards, yet nothing else appears affected: a black flag above him continues to flutter softly in the breeze, and the light tables and chairs sitting very close to the vehicle remain perfectly still. The explosion seems to originate from beneath the car and the vehicle is propelled into the air, but since the bomb was supposedly placed in the briefcase inside the car, the car itself ought to have stayed put — with the roof or windows blown outwards rather than the entire car being lifted. Likewise, Frank should realistically have been hurled only backwards, not upwards as well.

During the opening chase, when the car leaps from the bridge onto the lorry, you can see while it is airborne that the tyres are missing from the wheels on the left-hand side.

At the beginning of the fight on the bus, the men seize metal pipes that are "conveniently" stowed beneath the seats and trimmed to a precise length.

When Frank appears in the bus station's repair shop straight after emerging from the water, his clothes are dry and he leaves no wet trail as he walks.

At the end, when the refugees are rescued, the little girl Lai, pulled from the back of the lorry, stares straight at the camera — breaking the fourth wall — for nearly the entire time she is on screen.

In the villa's corridor fight, it's plain to see the two axes are rubber props — they flex and then spring back into shape each time they hit the corridor wall.

After the shoot-out, when Frank takes the Mercedes from Wall Street, he is shown switching off the car stereo to stop the background music, despite the stereo already being visibly switched off.

When Frank pulls up on the bridge with the three burglars to perform a burnout, you can spot sand trickling from the tyre, causing it to lose grip and generate extra smoke.

During the oil fight, when Frank straps bicycle pedals to his feet they appear to have only a single strap across the top, but a close-up of his right foot reveals an additional strap wrapping around the heel to secure them.

In the warehouse oil-slick fight sequence, several close-ups of Frank show the oil on him appearing to dry and form a crust — a behaviour not typical of oil but characteristic of the molasses used during filming.

During the lorry fight, "Wall Street" is clearly substituted by an older stunt performer when he is kicked and flung out onto the passenger door of the lorry. The harness/apparatus the stunt performer is wearing in that scene is also plainly visible.

When the car emerges from the alley with the steps, it is in reverse even though there was no space to turn round. Also, when Frank says, "See what I mean about the shocks?" it's obvious the car is moving forwards (you can see a window pass along the wall).

At 1:27:15, a refugee at the screen's right-hand side is helped to sit down; he then falls onto his side, and a moment later a police officer throws something at him.

In the opening chase, when the car becomes boxed in with no option other than to go off the bridge and onto the car transporter, if you watch closely just before it begins to move you can make out a full-height metal handrail in the car’s path. From the aerial shot as the car appears to go "over" that handrail, sparks are visible at the handrail’s location, yet in the very next shot with the car mid-air the handrail is still there intact.

During the bank robbery one of the robbers is shot, leaving three in the getaway car. When Frank drops them off at their white car, four robbers climb into it.