Goofs

The DEA building men's room door bangs on the back wall when Mathilda enters. Yet, Stansfield was able to hide behind it.

When Leon comes to the room he has blood on his right hand. When he gives Mathilda her present, there is no blood on his hand, nor when he answers the door for the hotel manager. He doesn't stain her dress either.

The bathroom mirror disappears and reappears during Mathilda's impressions. It is on the wall for Madonna, off the wall for Marilyn Monroe, back on the wall for Charles Chaplin, and off again for Gene Kelly.

A bit more than half way through the film, Mathilda enters a Men's room with a bag of food sitting on top of a pizza. She stops, removes her sunglasses, the camera cuts to a wide-out of the bathroom, and almost immediately cuts back to Mathilda. When this happens, the sunglasses have completely disappeared, never to be seen again in the film.

The amount of milk seen in the reflection of Leon's sunglasses at his meeting does not reflect the amount of milk in the next shot. The reflection in Leon's sunglasses after setting the milk glass down on the table, when asked if he is free on Tuesday the glass is gone in his sunglass reflection.

Léon gives Mathilda a revolver that she fires six times out the window. Later on (in the International version) she plays Russian Roulette with the same revolver, inserting three bullets into the cylinder, although the audio indicates she loads four. However, when she spins the cylinder, it is apparent that only three of five chambers are loaded. It would have been impossible for her to fire the gun six times without reloading.

The paintball Matilda shoots the jogger with would not have been nearly as accurate as a real bullet, even if it were able to make it that far without breaking up in the air. The plastic capsule would deform in the air from the velocity.

After Stansfield and his men raid Mathilda's apartment, Stansfield accidentally fires a round from his revolver after hearing the shotgun fire. He then shoots Mathilda's father twice as he's running, and then again four times as he's crawling, firing seven rounds total from the revolver, without emptying the spent casings or reloading until after the seventh shot was fired. The revolver shown clearly holds six rounds maximum.

When Matilda burns the drugs using alcohol as an accelerant, it burns with a bright orange flame. Alcohol burns with a light blue flame that is nearly invisible in bright light.

SPOILERAt the end of the film Leon does the "grenade ring gift". You never see the spoon pop off any of the grenades when his vest is opened. This means the grenades must have the longest fuses in history.

Many viewers believe that Stansfield never saw Leon, and therefore could not recognize him at the end, but may not remember that Stansfield visited Tony at the restaurant after Leon had killed part of Stansfield's crew. Thus, being intimidated and threatened by Stansfield, it could be assumed that Tony gave him a complete description of Leon, and possibly a photograph.

When Matilda is watching The Transformers (1984) for the final time in the film, scenes from different episodes of the series are used straight after each other. This was a conscious decision by the filmmaker to use scenes to echo Mathida's state of mind.

Stansfield repeatedly pops a drug capsule into his mouth and reacts instantly, as if he had ingested raw powder through his mouth or nasal passage. In reality, under normal circumstances a gel capsule could not have dissolved instantly in his mouth to allow immediate ingestion of the drug powder contained inside the capsule. It would have had to be swallowed, and even then several minutes would pass before the gel capsule could dissolve enough for the drug inside it to take effect.

However, if you watch closely (and listen) Stansfield is actually biting the capsules. You can see his jaw move and hear a distinctive *crack* sound. This would instantly release the powder into his mouth. For many drug users, part of the "high" is an endorphin rush when their body realizes that they are about to receive a dose. The mere taste of it is enough for the early stages of euphoria to kick in.

In other words, his reaction is partially psychosomatic, like a smoker reacting with a sigh to the first hit of a cigarette before any of the nicotine has any time to have an actual physical effect. Or how a heroin addict's withdrawal symptoms begin to disappear when they start preparing their shot. In that case, not only has the drug not had enough time to act but it's also not even in the body yet. And it can still cause a physical reaction.

You can see that the entire act is almost like a ritual for Stansfield, beginning with his shaking the container to listen to the pills rattle around.

It has been noted that Leon leaves fingerprints on the phone during the opening sequence. However, this is not "unprofessional" of Leon, as the presence of fingerprints only matters if the subject has already been fingerprinted and if a forensic team analyses the scene, which, given that Leon is intimidating a drug baron who won't invite further police involvement, is highly unlikely.

There is no phone line in the cordless phone base when the fat man picks it up.

When the fat man hangs up on his 911 call after Leon puts a knife to his throat, he pushes a button near the bottom of the handset to disconnect. The OFF button for that phone is at the top of the handset, not the bottom.

After the second SWAT attack, when the SWAT team back up against the wall, the wall wobbles and bends inwards

On the Uncut version, when Mathilda goes on her first "hit", she loads her gun with an empty magazine and shoots her mark with two red paintballs.

Mathilda's money should not be neatly wrapped as she darts away from the detective entering her apartment.

When Leon tells Mathilda, at the very end, to "grab the ax off the wall", when she opens the glass door, you can see director Luc Besson's reflection in the glass, behind the camera filming her.

When Stansfield is walking into the DEA building, followed by Mathilda, a cameraman is standing in the window high above the entrance.

According to the headmistress's phone call, the Spencer School is supposed to be in Wildwood, New Jersey, but the end of the film shows that it overlooks Manhattan. Wildwood is a oceanfront community at almost the southernmost tip of New Jersey, over 150 miles from NYC.

Mathilda takes the Tram to Roosevelt Island and arrives at the Spencer School there. She is on the lawn planting her plant and the camera pans back and it is as if she is in NJ or Long Island, very distant from Manhattan. Roosevelt Island is in the middle of the East River about 200 feet from Manhattan.

Mathilda never replaces the floorboard in her old apartment. When she is surprised there, she picks up the money and goes around the corner. The board would have been in the way and the hiding place obvious to the three men.

When Mathilda follows Stansfield, we see him enter One Centre St. (which is an NYC Municipal office building.) She tells Leon he works at 26 Federal Plaza.

More than once, Leon mentions the mark or the target as the client. He advises Mathilda to never shoot the face because they need to recognize the "client" or use a rifle to keep her distance from the "client". The client is the one who brings the job, who pays, not the targeted person. As a seasoned hitman Leon should've known this basic difference.

When Don Creech is listening in through the door, Leon cocks his gun loudly-an unmistakable noise-while Don Creech is just a foot away, on the other side, his ear right up against it. Unrealistically, he doesn't hear the gun, though he even hears the TV, which is several feet farther away.

When Mathilda decides to take a chance and tell the truth to the school teacher, she says that Leon died "this morning". However, it was daylight when Leon died, and subsequently Mathilda is walking around at night-time, and then it's day-light again when she's at the school. So it can't have been that morning that Leon died, it must have been the day before.