On February 6, 1846, at Paradise Square in Lower Manhattan's Five Points, a territorial battle of hand-to-hand combat between Bill "the Butcher" Cutting's U.S.-born nativist gang, the Natives, and "Priest" Vallon's Irish Catholic immigrant gang, the Dead Rabbits, concludes when Cutting kills Vallon, witnessed by Vallon's young son, Amsterdam. Cutting declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed but orders that Vallon's body be buried with honor. Amsterdam seizes the knife used to kill his father, races off, and buries it along with a medal his father gave him. He is later raised at Hellgate orphanage.
Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a retired black ops operative who quietly lives in Boston, Massachusetts, works at a Home Mart hardware store, where he befriends many of his co-workers, and helps a security guard trainee named Ralphie pass his qualification exam. McCall promised his recently deceased wife that he would leave his old life behind. Unable to sleep, McCall spends some late nights reading in a 24/7 diner, where he befriends Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz), a teenaged prostitute for the Russian Mafia, who is regaled by Robert with his philosophical interpretations of the books he reads. One night she is hospitalized when brutally beaten by her pimp, Slavi (David Meunier). McCall enters a restaurant owned by the Russian mob and offers to buy Alina's freedom from Slavi for $9,800, but Slavi refuses, dismissing McCall as old and impotent. Failing in this approach, McCall kills Slavi and four of his men with skillful close combat efficiency.
Career criminal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and his crew, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore) and Trejo (Danny Trejo), hire new recruit Waingro (Kevin Gage) and commit an armored car heist, stealing $1.6 million in bearer bonds belonging to money launderer Roger Van Zant (William Fichtner). However, Waingro impulsively kills one of the guards, forcing the robbers to kill the remaining two so as to leave no witnesses. An infuriated McCauley tries to kill Waingro afterwards, but he escapes. Afterwards McCauley's fence, Nate (Jon Voight), suggests they try to sell the bonds back to Van Zant, who agrees but secretly instructs his men to kill McCauley at the meeting. With backup from his crew, McCauley thwarts the ambush and vows revenge.
Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), seated in what appears to be a jail cell, opens the film with a prologue about having carried out the "perfect robbery". A van is driving from Brooklyn to the Wall Street area. Inside is a team of masked robbers, dressed as painters, who call each other by variants of the name "Steve" (i.e. Steve, Stevie, Stevo). They seize control of a Manhattan bank and take the employees and patrons hostage. They divide the hostages into groups and hold them in different rooms, forcing them to strip and don painters' clothes identical to their own. The robbers rotate the hostages between various rooms and occasionally insert themselves covertly into the groups, while also taking turns working on an unspecified project involving demolishing the floor in one of the bank's storage rooms.
Paul Blart is a resident in West Orange, New Jersey with his teenage daughter, Maya, and elderly mother, Margaret. Aspiring to join the New Jersey State Police, he trains at the police academy, but his hypoglycemic medical condition causes him to collapse, therefore failing the exam. To shape things up for his career, Blart works as a security guard at the West Orange Pavillion Mall.
Michael Sullivan Sr. (Hanks) is an enforcer for Irish mob boss John Rooney (Newman) in Rock Island, Illinois during the Great Depression. Rooney raised the orphan Sullivan and loves him more than his own biological son, the unstable Connor (Craig). Connor snaps and kills disgruntled associate Finn McGovern when meeting him with Sullivan, resulting in Sullivan gunning down McGovern's men. Sullivan's twelve-year-old son Michael Sullivan, Jr had hidden in his father's car and witnesses the event. Despite Sullivan swearing his son to secrecy and Rooney pressuring Connor to apologize for the reckless action, Connor murders Sullivan's wife Annie and younger son Peter, mistaking him for Sullivan, Jr. He then sends Sullivan to an ambush at a speakeasy but Sullivan realizes and escapes to Chicago with his son to seek Al Capone, for work and to discover the location of Connor, who has gone into hiding.
A woman in a wedding dress, the Bride, lies wounded in a church in El Paso, having been attacked by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. She tells their leader, Bill, that she is carrying his baby. He shoots her.
LouAnne (Michelle Pfeiffer), a discharged U.S. Marine, applies for a teaching job in High School, and is surprised and pleased to be offered the position with immediate effect. Showing up the next day to begin teaching, however, she finds herself confronted with a classroom of tough, sullen teenagers, all from lower-class and underprivileged backgrounds, involved in gang warfare and drug pushing, flatly refusing to engage with anything. They immediately coin the nickname "White Bread" for LouAnne, due to her race and apparent lack of authority, to which LouAnne responds by returning the next day in a leather jacket and teaching them karate. The students show some interest in such activities, but immediately revert to their former behavior when LouAnne tries to teach the curriculum.
Mob boss Paul Vitti narrates a brief history of the Mafia: in the wake of Albert Anastasia's death, the dispute over who among Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino and Joe Bananas will ascend to mob supremacy results in the Apalachin Meeting in upstate New York. The meeting is raided by the FBI, and the Mafia does not call a summit again until the present day.
John Bridger, a professional safecracker, has assembled a team to steal 35 million dollars worth of gold bullion from a safe held by Italian gangsters in Venice that had stolen it weeks earlier. The team includes Charlie Croker, a thief and John's protege, Napster, a computer expert, Rob, their wheelman, Steve, their inside man, and Left Ear, their explosives expert. They successfully complete the theft by stealing the actual safe and stealing the gold from it while the gangsters are occupied with a decoy. After leaving the city, the team agrees to split up the gold and part ways once they return to the United States. However, Steve turns on them: in the Alps near Austria, he and his own men intercept their van and take the gold, shoots and kills John, while the rest of the team falls into the river trying to escape.
In West Texas, 1980, Ed Tom Bell laments the increasing violence in a region where, like his father and grandfather before him, he has become sheriff. Anton Chigurh, a hitman, strangles a sheriff's deputy to escape custody and steals a car by using a captive bolt pistol to kill the driver.
In a filthy kitchen of an underground abortionist, an unkempt former medical doctor puts on surgical gloves and quickly downs a full glass of cheap whiskey. Face down on the kitchen table is a barely conscious Porter (Mel Gibson), severely wounded with two large bullet wounds in his back. The doctor pours whiskey on Porter's back to sterilize the area and digs out the bullets. Porter spends five months recuperating. Porter narrates that he had $70,000 taken from him and that is what he was going to get back.
The film takes place in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. Johnny Hooker, a grifter in Joliet, Illinois, cons $11,000 in cash from an unsuspecting victim with the aid of his partners Luther Coleman and Joe Erie. Buoyed by the windfall, Luther announces his retirement and advises Hooker to seek out an old friend, Henry Gondorff, in Chicago to teach him "the big con". Unfortunately, their victim was a numbers racket courier for vicious crime boss Doyle Lonnegan. Corrupt Joliet police Lieutenant William Snyder confronts Hooker, revealing Lonnegan's involvement and demanding part of Hooker’s cut. Having already spent his share, Hooker pays Snyder in counterfeit bills. Lonnegan's men murder Luther, and Hooker flees for his life to Chicago.
A joint mission of the American FBI and the Russian MVD leads to the death of the younger brother of an Azerbaijani mobster (David Hayman). In retaliation, the mobster hires an enigmatic assassin known only by the pseudonym "The Jackal" (Bruce Willis) to kill an unseen target. The Jackal demands $70 million for the job, to which the mobster reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile, the MVD capture one of the mafia's henchmen. During interrogation by torture, the henchman reveals the name "Jackal". This, coupled with the documents recovered from the henchman's briefcase, leads the FBI and MVD to assume the target for the retaliatory hit is FBI Director Donald Brown (John Cunningham).