(at around 60 mins) When Rollie calls young Chris on the phone, the movie Chris is watching on television is the finished film Rollie was shooting the effects for at the start of the original F/X (1986).
When the film was released, it came under fire in the media from effects artists who claimed it was giving away trade secrets.
Although set in New York, the majority of this film was shot in Toronto over an 11-week period during the spring and summer of 1990. The location required some extra effort to "sell" the illusion. In fact: streets in Toronto's Chinatown had to be dirtied up to match their New York counterparts.
This film was shot as an R rated film but was edited down to PG-13 to attract a wider audience. This was partly due to the success of the edited network television premiere of the original film, and the younger audience it gained from its subsequent airings.
When Leo is in his bar practicing bar flair (bottle and cocktail tin & glass spinning) he says to Rolly "hey, I nearly got it!" Bryan Brown played Tom Cruise's mentor, Coglan, in the movie "Cocktail", where he teaches Cruise all the tricks of being a flair bartender.