| Director | Dominic Sena |
|---|---|
| Genre | action film, heist film |
| Runtime | 99 min |
| Country | Australia, United States |
| Budget | $102 million |
| Box office | $147.1 million |
Cyber-hacker Stanley Jobson becomes notorious for infecting the FBI's Carnivore program with a computer virus. Stanley's parole forbids him from accessing the internet and computers while his ex-wife, Melissa, an alcoholic and part-time porn star, issued a restraining order against him. This also prevents him from seeing his daughter, Holly.
Ginger Knowles persuades Stanley to work for Gabriel Shear, who forces him into cracking a secure Defense Department server. After the hack, Gabriel offers Stanley $10 million to program a multi-headed worm, a "hydra", to siphon $9.5 billion from the government slush funds.
Stanley begins work on the worm, learning that Gabriel leads Black Cell, a secret organization created by J. Edgar Hoover to attack terrorists that threaten the United States. He also privately discovers Ginger is a DEA agent working undercover and is further surprised to discover a corpse that resembles Gabriel.
After taking Holly home from school, Stanley discovers he is being followed by FBI agent J.T. Roberts, who had previously arrested him. Roberts, though monitoring Stanley, is more interested in Gabriel as he does not appear on any government database, and after learning that another hacker, Axl Torvalds, was killed by Gabriel's men, warns Stanley to be cautious.
Stanley opts to secretly code a backdoor in his hydra that reverses the money transfer after a short period. Meanwhile, Senator Jim Reisman, who oversees Black Cell, learns the FBI started tracking Gabriel and orders him to stand down. He refuses and defeats a hit team dispatched against him by Reisman. In retaliation, Gabriel kills him and continues his plan.
Stanley delivers the hydra to Gabriel and leaves to spend time with Holly, only to find that Gabriel's men abducted her and framed him for the murders of Melissa and her porn producer husband. He is then forced to participate in a bank heist to get Holly back.
At the site of the heist, Gabriel and his men storm a branch and secure its employees and customers as hostages, fitting each of them with ball-bearing-based explosives similar to Claymore mines. When police and FBI surround the branch, Gabriel takes Stanley to a nearby coffee shop across the street to meet with Roberts, but Gabriel spends the time discussing the film Dog Day Afternoon and the nature of misdirection.
In the bank, Gabriel has one of his men escort a hostage out to demonstrate how they are rigged with explosives, so a sharpshooter kills the man. As other agents start to pull the hostage away from the bank, the bomb detonates, pulverizing her and much of the street.
Gabriel instructs Stanley to launch the hydra and turns Holly over to him once completed. However, the back door triggers before they can leave the bank, leading to Stanley being recaptured while Holly is rescued. Gabriel threatens to kill Ginger, whom he knows is a DEA agent, unless Stanley re-siphons the money back to a Monte Carlo bank. Although Stanley complies, Gabriel shoots down Ginger.
Gabriel and his men load the hostages onto a bus and demand a plane wait for them at the local airport, but while en route, the bus is lifted off by a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane and carried across the city. The bus is then deposited on the roof of a skyscraper, where Gabriel deactivates the bombs and attempts to escape with his surviving men on a waiting helicopter. Stanley shoots down the helicopter using a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that Gabriel's men had left on the bus.
Roberts takes Stanley to verify a corpse they found, believing Gabriel was a Mossad agent. There is no record of a DEA agent named Ginger Knowles, and her body was not found. Stanley recognizes the corpse as the one he discovered earlier and realizes that the whole scenario was a deception; Ginger was wearing a bulletproof vest and was working with Gabriel all along, who escaped via a different route.
Despite Stanley not telling the police that Gabriel and Ginger are still alive, Roberts arranges for Stanley to have full custody of Holly, where they depart to places elsewhere. In Monte Carlo, Gabriel and Ginger withdraw the stolen money and later watch as a yacht at sea explodes. A news report reveals the destruction of the yacht, carrying a known terrorist, as the third such incident in weeks.