That nerve gas innoculation was ridiculous!

Even as a kid, the few times I saw this movie, I thought the concept of stabbing yourself in the heart with a gigantic needle, just to keep yourself safe from nerve gas, was ridiculous. Turns out, I was right.

I read up on it years later online, and just like I thought, if any of the characters in the movie had tried in real life to use that method of injection, they may as well have stabbed themselves in the heart with a knife, because they would have gotten the same result.

Either the writers added it in for drama, or did not know how the human body and medicine worked. Frankly, the heart is not designed to get stabbed by anything and keep on beating without leaking out fluids and eventually stopping.

It would have made more sense to use an epi-pen like device (though I'm not sure they had those in 1996) on the characters' thighs, or injected themselves in the shoulder. It takes just one minute for all your blood to circulate around the body just once, and even faster if your pulse rate is super-high, like what was going on in the big action scenes. It wouldn't have taken long for the serum to save you from the deadly nerve gas.

One article I read suggested this idea came from "Pulp Fiction," where Uma Thurman's character had overdosed on heroin and had to have amphetamines injected right into her heart to save her. Again, in real life, she would have died if they really had tried that.