Why does Howard Payne (Speed) hold his phone like this?

Judging from this scene, it’s so the camera can see his face.

That always bothered me too.

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This would indicate that the blast was on his left side. So why is he favoring his left ear so much that he’s using his right hand to hold the phone up to his left ear?

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i mean maybe - it's possible he's deaf in his right ear but not the left.

I think he has an ear bud in his left ear when he blows the elevator early in the beginning of the movie.

Prob just how the writer ended it without even trying to be deep. You would assume Payne would be smart enough to know this.

But trying to overthink it, greed. He went through all this trouble just to be blinded by it in the end.

Because he’s a mad man,

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Why does Payne not suspect something might be up with the money dropped at Pershing Square? (As we find out, the bags have been rigged with dye packs that explode when he opens them. The money is probably fake too.)

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That scene comes immediately after the SWAT team runs into a known bombers house and is completely suprised that the bomber put a bomb in his house

The frickin SWAT team.

So by that standard, I’m suprised Hopper didn’t just use a fake mustache to pick up the money in plain sight and walk away

ETA I misread your post so my point doesn’t really make sense but I stand by it

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But they never suspect that Payne won’t be there and that he’s got the ENTIRE house rigged to explode.

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This is excusable if it wasn’t the SWAT team. They are trained specifically on these situations and if they didn’t consider the possibility that a guy who rigged 3 bombs to go off remotely, would do so at his own house (regardless of whether he would do it from another location, it’s entirely possible he would do it to avoid jail time even if he was on the premises)

Also if the technology is advanced enough to perfectly live stream the inside of a moving bus, then I would guess they would have some way of atleast figuring out if someone was actually in the house they are raiding

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They don’t have time to be too cautious.

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This should be routine work for them. They are essentially a bomb squad. They know how to do these things in a small window of time.

It’s just bad script writing, which is fine for such a cheesy summer blockbuster movie the original ending had Harry turning out to be a bad guy so they had to make changes on the fly when they figured out audiences hated it

I don’t think so.

The plan was for that part to be played by Ed Harris, and when he dropped out they didn’t feel it was realistic that Jeff Daniels would be the bomber so they changed it.

Ton of interesting stuff in the production for this movie

Tarantino was offered the movie and turned it down- later regretted it and called it one of his favorite 20 movies of all time.

The now infamous Joss Whedon did most of the dialogue. The original script, written by Justified creator Graham Yost, was a lot more serious with less punch lines until they brought Whedon in

The entire ending on the train is what got the movie green lit. The original script ended when they saved the bus but no one would buy it because they thought a whole movie on a bus would suck. So they wrote that entire train sequence to get it made. Watching it now narratively you can clearly see where it was meant to end and then the movie just keeps going