Headscratchers / Con Air

• How in the bloody blue hell did Poe get convicted of murder? His pregnant wife was threatened by a bunch of thugs in a bar parking lot. That should have been an open-and-shut case of self defense, military training or not.
  • http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118880/faq
    • Which of course still leaves the question of why he was in a federal prison for what was basically a bar fight that got ugly, the feds would have no jurisdiction here, it's strictly as local matter and should have been in state court.
    • That IMDB FAQ raises another question of why the fuck did he plead guilty? Any lawyer advising him to plead guilty in that situation should be disbarred for incompetence.
    • Err, technically speaking, going for a self-defense claim requires pleading guilty — in that you are admitting, on the record, that you did indeed inflict X injuries on Y dudes over there. If the court then decides that your reason for inflicting those injuries was not sufficient to qualify as a valid self-defense claim, that kinda does leave you stuck holding the shitty end of the stick.
    • No, self-defense requires that you plead not guilty. You are admitting that you did it, but that you had no choice because of self defense.
  • Biased anti-military judge, perhaps. His speech about how Poe is a "living weapon" and must be held to different standards than "normal" men certainly implies he has no love for soldiers.
    • Except that idea of "being held to different standards" goes against both the letter and the spirit of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal treatment under the law. No judge in their right mind would vocalize for the record their intent to completely disregard that part of the Constitution based on their own personal prejudices. He may have been biased and anti-military, but an action like that is practically begging for an appeals court to overturn the verdict.
    • What exactly makes you think every judge is in their right mind? They can get away with whatever they want as long as no one calls them on it, and since a lot of people have adopted the mindset that judges have absolute legal power to do whatever the hell they want, they don't often get called on it.
    • Poe's lawyer should have known otherwise. Why didn't he do his job and deal with the judge?
  • Along with this, why did he go before a civilian court instead of a military one? Even if he had just gotten honorably discharged, he probably still would have been able to get an attorney through the Army.
  • Not sure about the second suggestion but I do know that in order to be sentenced federal prison you need to go to in front of a federal judge.
• Why was there an entire armory of assault rifles and grenade launchers onboard the aircraft? It only seems to serve to arm the prisoners against the National Guard then have any logical reason of being there as the guards onboard such a cramped environment would suffice with sidearms and shotguns at most.
  • If the plane were to crash, the guards would need to be able to control the inmates.
  • It's possible there more guns then usual because they were also stocking the prison armory at their destination.
• How does the DEA guy plan to catch an airplane going 228 mils per hour (365 km/h for all us Europeans) with attack choppers (the Cobra does 315 km/h per hour, the Apache 298 km/h)? Even when the plane is dragging and only doing 205 mph (328 km/h) the choppers still would not be able to catch it, always assuming they were actually able to sprint at top speed all the time.
  • The same way guys riding motorcycles plan to stop the guy they're chasing who's in a car. It's an action movie and tropes have precedence over physics.
  • For the majority of the movie, the choppers aren't actually chasing the Jailbird, they are chasing the Tourist plane into the Grand Canyon thanks to Pinball's ruse. By the time they realize it and double back, the choppers are between the Jailbird (which had landed at the fictional Lerner Airfield, somewhere in the California/Nevada desert) and its destination (Mexico). They pick Larkin up after the battle at the airfield (right after the Jailbird escapes), but by this point the Jailbird is damaged from the crash and they are able to catch it.
• Why was Simms's action treated by Larkin as the cause of all the trouble? He makes a big deal to Malloy about how "No one carries on these flights" but Cyrus was already armed (and the flight already taken over by the prisoners) by the time Simms got his gun out. He may have gotten himself killed by his own actions, but he didn't make the overall situation any worse than it already was.
  • Larkin doesn't know how they lost the plane. When he learns that Sims brought a gun on, that would seem like an obvious security breach that could result in losing the plane.
  • It might well have made it worse — having the gun emboldened Malloy's man to act immediately. If he hadn't had the gun, he might have played along for a little bit, like Poe did, instead of acting hastily and getting himself killed.
• Why was Baby-o (Poes cellmate) going to this new supermax? the narration about it that was given suggested it was build specifcally to hold lifers and Death Row inmates, basically scum-of-the-universe, we are never told if he is like Poe and just "hitching a ride" to another prison, he was poes' cellmate which indicates his crime wasn't a life sentence.
  • They do show that the plane is supposed to make several stops and that prisoners will come off at those stops as well as getting on, it was probably felt that the audience could put two and two together from that.
• While we're all happy that Garland let the girl live - where is her adult supervision? The pilot that we last saw running through the desert or the dead air traffic controller? Also, she seems pretty cheerful after having been a few minute's walk from a drawn out gunfight.
  • She was likely the granddaughter of the old man Poe found hiding under the truck.
• Did Larkin really expect Cyrus to tell him where the plane is headed just because he asked?
  Cyrus: "We're going to Disneyland."
  • Probably not, but he might've gotten something useful.