Goofs

In the first few shots of the film, Melissa is not wearing a bra, but in the last couple of shots as her argument with Paul Crewe escalates, a bra has appeared.

After Paul backs the car off of the rising drawbridge, the rear end is smashed, and the trunk lid is flapping up and down. When he drives it down to the bay to dunk it in the water, the trunk lid is securely closed.

After the first time that Crewe hits Bogdanski "below the belt" with the football, the game clock has stopped at 2:29 remaining in the game, after the second time he does it, the clock is at 2:35 remaining and running.

After Scarboro scores his touchdown, he is taken out by a guard who hits him in his left knee. But when he is brought into the infirmary, his right knee is bandaged.

When Crewe goes up and over to score the final touchdown he is shown landing with just his upper body and the ball across the goal line. In the next frame from another angle his entire body is across the goal line.

With the score 8-0 guards, the Mean Machine scores a touchdown. Crewe decides to go for a fake instead of kicking the PAT, presumably to tie the score and the play is successful but the result is only 1 point, the same result as a successful PAT would have been.

The guards are leading 28-13 when they score a touchdown. After a missed PAT, the scoreboard shows the score as 35-13.

When Papa John scores at the start of the second half he actually drops the ball before the goal line when somersaulting into the end zone.

Melissa warns Paul not to touch her Maserati. The car was sold in the US as a Citroen/Maserati SM, a Citroen with a Maserati engine. The owner would be more likely to refer to it as Maserati.

Incorrectly regarded as goof: When Capt. Kenauer attempts to strike Crewe with a baton as he is kneeling in the swamp, Crewe grabs the baton and you can see the baton flex.

The baton is rubber but this doesn't mean it is a prop. Batons were and are often made of hard rubber, much like a sap (a shot-filled flat leather item used similarly to a baton for compliance strikes).

Rubber batons were somewhat more common in the 1970s when the movie was filmed and set, but are still made. They were also preferred to hard batons in prison settings as a lost one could not be repurposed into a more dangerous weapon as easily.

Richard Kiel hurt his arm during the shoot and can be seen with his arm in a sling in some parts of the football game scenes (his character is supposedly fully fit).

Crewe and another inmate are fighting (wrestling) in the swamp When Capt. Kenauer strikes Crewe on the back with a baton during the fight, the rectangular padding is visible under Crewe's shirt.

During the fourth quarter of the football game between the guards and inmates, the inmates try a dropkick. The kick clearly goes wide left, missing the points, yet the referees signal a good kick.

When Capt. Kenauer attempts to strike Crewe with a baton as he is kneeling in the swamp, Crewe grabs the baton. As Crewe rises from the swamp while still holding the baton, you can see the baton flex, as clearly it is a rubber prop baton.

During the swamp scene, one of the guards calls out Crewe (Reynolds) to have Granville attached to him. When Crewe turns, we see his bottom lip very swollen and a lot of the skin shows to be red. But when Granville is finally attached to Crewe, Crewe doesn't have a swollen lip and the red is barely noticeable.

When Crewe sends the car into the bay he does so by reaching into the stationary vehicle to release the hand brake where it accelerates over the edge of the pier and into the water. Throughout the car chase, he was shown driving a manual transmission car. The car sent into the water had to be an automatic transmission car to be stopped in gear with the brake applied.