In the 1999 film "Entrapment", Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, Gin, sees the following Chinese characters, which are supposed to be used to dial a code:
蚊子炮打
夺刀用与
生别牛枪
She immediately spots that six of the characters can be used to say 别用炮打蚊子, bié yòng pào dǎ wén zi, which means "Don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito." She identifies this as a Confucius (孔子) quote.
This is a top secret room in one of the biggest banks in South East Asia. It is strange that they would choose a code that is easy to guess. But I guess, they perhaps had good insurance, so they did not really care.
The grammar of 别用炮打蚊子 is not particularly classic, as far as I can tell. It is good modern Chinese, but hardly the kind Confucius would have used 2500 years ago.
It is also surprising that Confucius would have anything to say about cannons, almost one thousand years before gunpowder was invented.
So, basically, it seems like Gin is wrong from beginning to end.
But, I do not know if that matters very much, because she had a pretty smile when she said it.
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