Plot
The film begins with a SWAT team going into the house of a United States Senator. Someone is holding the Senator hostage. The bomb squad arrives in a helicopter and they rappel down into the house. Frank Glass (Seagal) is in charge of the bomb squad. Glass finds a bomb in the basement and works to disarm it while the SWAT team is in a shoot out with some of the hostage takers.
Glass gets the bomb disarmed, but he thinks it was too easy to do it, that it was meant to make him think he disarmed it. Everyone is ordered out of the house. The elaborate bomb is shown just before it explodes.
A year later, in San Francisco, two cops—Ray Nettles (Sizemore) and his partner Art "Fuzzy" Rice (Nas) are driving around talking. Nettles and Fuzzy are narcotics cops. Nettles is a cop on the edge. His wife and son were killed by a bomb.
Ever since then, he has lost his enthusiasm for his job, hygiene, and life in general. Fuzzy has been trying to cheer Nettles up, and talk out his demons. They stumble upon something suspicious and decide to investigate, and they end up in an apartment building busting some guy. Then they end up at a warehouse.
Nettles runs into a scientist named Claire Manning (Pressly), and Fuzzy gets killed by Swann (Hopper), the IRA-connected terrorist who bombed the Senator's house. Nettles and Swann have a stand-off until Swann and his men just leave. Nettles arrests Claire. She refuses to say anything about Swann. Claire is wearing an odd-looking bracelet. Nettles takes it to the bomb squad, and Glass looks it over.
It turns out that the bracelet contains a powerful explosive. Swann wants Claire back, more than anything. The police decide to hold Claire in an effort to find out what Swann is up to, which makes Swann more than a little angry. Swann rigs up a powerful bomb, and he calls in a threat to the police station—if Claire isn’t released within an hour, a large bomb will go off somewhere in the city. Swann intends to continue setting off bombs until Claire is released.
Swann and the men who are working for him are in the city for a big job. And Nettles becomes obsessed with nailing Swann. Glass and the bomb squad are working on the case because bombs are involved. Nettles ends up working with Glass and the bomb squad. Together, they attempt to stop Swann, and they try to figure out the big job that Swann is in town for, and how Claire is involved in it. It turns out that Claire is out for revenge—her husband was murdered after discovering plans to build an elementary school on a toxic waste dumping area.
Claire blames the San Francisco City Government for her husband's murder, so she has enlisted Swann's help to get revenge by blowing up city hall. That's the big job that Swann is in town for. With the help of Glass, Nettles sets out to find and stop Swann... and maybe exorcise the demons from his own tortured past.
Read more about this topic: Ticker (2001 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)