One day Jack (Matthew Lillard) shows up at the antiques-laden warehouse apartment of Max (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Jamie (Valeria Golino), two ruthless low-level criminals with higher aspirations than the two-bit thieving they do now. Jack insists he's Max's brother, but Jamie, whose hobby is collecting poison, has her doubts. When Max arrives to find Jack tied to a chair, it's revealed that Jack isn't Max's brother -- he's a hoodlum with a line on a briefcase with a million dollars and a priceless, mysterious antiquity called the Spanish Judges; all he wants is Max and Jamie's help recovering the loot. But when the plan goes awry, and violently so, suddenly loyalties and motives are called into question. Was this Jack's plan all along, or did Jamie have something to do with it?