10 Movies That Get Basic Facts Wrong

5. Shooting A Computer Will Destroy The Hard Drive - The Negotiator

1998's Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson-starring thriller The Negotiator is a damn fun time, as long as you switch your brain off enough to forgive a vital plot point revolving around computer hardware.

At the end of the movie it's revealed that Chief Frost (Ron Rifkin) was the villain all along, and in an attempt to cover his tracks, he fires a single bullet into a computer containing incriminating information, causing the computer to immediately power down, apparently destroying all the data.

And while back in 1998 that seemed plausible enough to a less-computer-savvy general public, over two decades on it does seem rather silly.

Above all else, it's highly unlikely that Frost's bullet hit the computer's hard drive rather than any other component, making it probable that the cops could just remove the hard drive and find all the evidence anyway.

And even if the bullet did hit the hard drive, that still doesn't entirely discount the possibility that data could be retrieved from it by forensic investigators.

You can put this down to Frost being an older man without sufficient computer know-how, but it was clearly just an attempt to simplify things for the sake of an audience that, at the time, mostly didn't know any better.