Remember that scene in which Al Pacino‘s Vincent Hanna and the cops, hiding inside a parked ten-wheeler, are spying on Robert DeNiro‘s Neil McCauley, Val Kilmer‘s Chris Shiherlis and two others as they begin to rob some nondescript joint (possibly a precious metal depot) in downtown Los Angeles?

After a careless uniformed cop makes a noise inside the truck, McCauley, suspecting the worst, aborts the heist…”we walk!” The crew leaves the building carrying nothing, but they’re being taped, of course, and so Hanna and the cops know their faces, obviously including Shiherlis.

There’s a scene directly following in which McCauley tells Chris and Tom Sizemore‘s Michael Cheritto that they’ve almost certainly been identified…”assume it all.”

After the big downtown L.A. bank robbery, Hanna’s team, led by Mykelti Williamson‘s Sergeant Bobby Drucker, has Chris’s wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd), in a Venice apartment. They’re somehow anticipating that Chris will try to rendezvous with Charlene at the Venice pad (how exactly?), and within a couple of minutes a car slowly approaches from a small side street, and Drucker has an idea it might be Chris.

The car pulls up and the driver gets out, and we see that Chris has sheared off his long blonde hair and is now sporting a Chris Walken flattop. Charlene, standing on an outdoor balcony, signals Chris with that wonderfully subtle hand gesture that things are not cool. Chris gets back in and drives off. Drucker radios a black-and-white to stop Chris and check his ID. Except he has clean ID, identifying him as someone else, and they let him go.

We’re expected to believe that Drucker can’t recognize Chris because his hair is shorter? He and Hanna know his facial features — why can’t they make him despite the length of his hair? They haven’t passed around photos of Chris to everyone concerned?