Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a struggling young man trying to make ends meet by painting houses in suburban Los Angeles. On day, Sean meets "Duke" Wayne (George Wendt), who introduces Sean to his boss, a shady developer named Ray Matthews (Daniel Baldwin). Ray hires Sean as a spy, and orders him to follow Eric Gatley (Ron Livingston), an accountant who has been investigating Ray's company. Problems start when Ray, while drunk, offers Sean $13,000 to kill Eric. Sean accepts his offer and, although ambivalent, ends up killing Gatley by breaking into his house and stabbing him to death.
When Sean goes to collect his pay, however, he is double-crossed and beaten up. When Sean persists that they pay him, he is kidnapped and taken to Ray's secluded farm. It becomes clear at this point that Matthews never had any intent on paying Sean for the killing. Matthews only wanted to use (and eliminate) Sean. But Sean survives from having a bullet put in his head when he reveals that he had taken Gatley's work file of evidence and hidden it along with his documentation of events leading to the murder.
When torture fails to make him disclose the whereabouts of the file, Sean is then brutally beaten about the head with golf clubs many times by Ray and his henchmen daily for weeks, in an effort to destroy his memory. After suffering a heavy amount of trauma, Sean escapes, killing Duke, and finds his way to a downtown homeless shelter where Gatley's widow, Susan (Kari Wuhrer), takes him under her wing, oblivious to his role in her personal tragedy. After she nurses him back to normal, he feels he has been reborn and they become lovers and he moves into her house. But after a few weeks, Susan finds his file describing the murder and, enraged, physically attacks him. Defending himself, Sean accidentally kills her.
Having lost what he saw as his redemption and rebirth, angry and cynical then ever, Sean returns to Ray's farm and methodically and ruthlessly exacts revenge on his captors, killing all of them but saving Matthews for last, and then sets the farmhouse on fire and walks off into the sunset to look for a new kind of life elsewhere.
