A day trader (Embry) and his fiancée (Robertson) get caught up in high stakes gambling.

The film opens with a man called "Mr. X" (David O'Hara) meeting with a ballistics expert, attempting to find out who made a particular bullet for a "competitor". The conversation is interrupted by a sniper shooting the ballistics expert through the head from a nearby building. Mr. X dashes down the corridor and leaps through the window, shooting and killing his opponents in mid-flight. Mr. X then receives a phone call from a man he calls Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Cross tells the man that the snipers were decoys. Cross then fires a multi-stage bullet through Mr. X's head from the window of a house across town.A young man named Wesley Gibson is introduced. He works at a dead-end job with an over-bearing boss. His live-in girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend, and his voice-over says that he is finding it difficult to care about anything. One night, at the pharmacy, Wesley meets a mysterious woman who tells him that his father was an elite assassin who had been killed the day before. Wesley does not believe this; he tells the woman that his father abandoned him a week after his birth. At that moment, Cross appears, gun in hand. The woman opens fire on Cross. Wesley and the woman escape from the resulting shoot-out and have a wild car chase in the streets of Chicago.Wesley is brought to the headquarters of The Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins. The group's leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), formally introduces Gibson to Fox (Angelina Jolie) the woman from the night before, and invites him to follow in his father's footsteps as an assassin. Sloan tests Wesley by making him shoot the wings off a fly. When Wesley refuses, a gun is put to his head, triggering a panic attack. Wesley somehow manages to shoot the wings off several flies. Wesley wakes up the next day hoping that everything was a dream, but discovers his father's gun (which he stashes in the toilet tank). He also discovers $3.6 million in his bank account. Wesley tells his boss to "Go fuck yourself!" and quits his job, knocking out his "friend's" (the one who sleeps with Wesley's girlfriend) teeth with his keyboard, with broken keys spelling out 'fuck you', as he leaves. Fox, who has been waiting for him outside, gives him a ride back to the Fraternity headquarters - an unassuming textile mill.With his training completed, Wesley is given orders to kill people from the Loom of Fate, a loom that gives the names of the targets through a binary code hidden in weaving errors of the fabric. While on his first assignment, Wesley seems to refuse to kill his target. He recalls an earlier conversation with Fox in which he opined that it isn't right to kill people without knowing anything about them or why they deserve to die. Fox then told him her life story. Fox's father was a judge who was handling a sensitive case and the defendant had put a hit on him. One day a hired killer held the young girl at knife point as they waited for her father to return home. The killer then lit the father on fire as the young girl watched. He later branded his initials into her neck. Fox explained that the man who killed her father had been targeted by the Fraternity several weeks prior to the events of the story, but their assassin had failed to carry out his duty. Fox then tells Wesley The Fraternity's idea, "Kill one and maybe save thousands". Wesley bends a bullet trajectory to kill the target a moment after this recollection.Wesley and Fox travel to the Fraternity's original base of operations in Europe. The two easily capture Pekwarsky and force him to take them to Cross. The meeting leads to a confrontation between Wesley and Cross on a moving train. Fox steals a car and crashes it into the train, eventually causing the train to derail when it reaches a bridge over a deep ravine. Wesley is about to fall into the ravine before Cross catches his hand, saving his life. Wesley unhesitatingly shoots him. Before Cross dies, he tells Wesley that he is his real father and that the Fraternity had been lying to him. Fox confirms the truth and explains that Wesley was recruited because he was the only person that Cross wouldn't kill. Fox then tells Wesley about the kill order on him and raises her weapon to shoot him. Wesley, however, shoots the glass underneath him and plunges into the river below.Wesley awakes in an apartment across the street from his former apartment. He finds Pekwarsky there. Upon inspecting the apartment, he discovers it belonged to his father, who had been monitoring him his whole life. Pekwarsky hands Wesley a loom weaving and tells him to decode it. Wesley is shocked to discover Sloan's name in the weaving. Pekwarsky explains that Cross went rogue due to this discovery. Since then Sloan has used false kill orders to direct the Fraternity as mere contract killers. Wesley realizes that Cross had never actually tried to kill him in their previous confrontations; he had been assassinating Fraternity members to keep them away from Wesley. Pekwarsky departs after giving Wesley plane tickets, stating that his father wished him a life free of violence. While exploring the apartment further, Wesley discovers a secret room containing all of his father's weapons and maps. He even finds a supply of the Exterminator's mini-bombs, realizing that the Exterminator had been working with his father. Wesley then devises a plan to take out Sloan and the Fraternity. Upon entering Sloan's office, he finds himself surrounded by Fox and her fellow master assassins. Wesley tells them that Sloan is killing for profit by providing his killers with fraudulent kill orders. He then attempts to kill Sloan, but is disarmed by Fox.Fox asks Sloan if this is true. Sloan then reveals that all of their names had come up in the weaving, and that he had merely acted to protect them. He then goes on to explain that if they truly believe in the code then they should take their lives right where they stand. Otherwise, they should kill Wesley. The other assassins decide to kill Wesley, but Fox turns on her fellow assassins. She "curves" a bullet to kill the assassins who had been standing in a circle, then throws her gun to Wesley before stepping back into the bullet. Sloan escapes. Wesley, penniless once more, does not know what to do with himself. While Wesley provides a voice-over, the audience sees a young man sitting in front of a computer in a cubicle much like Wesley did at the beginning of the film. The man types the name "Wesley Gibson" into Google and searches for it but does not have any results, as in the beginning of the film. Sloan appears and points a gun at the man's head. At that moment, the man turns around and is revealed to be a decoy and looks down. Sloan also looks down and realizes he is standing on a marked spot. He then looks up and says, "Oh, fuck", before Wesley, who is actually several miles away, shoots him in the head from the comfort of his own appartment, from the same window his father killed Mr. X from at the beginning of the movie..The movie ends with Wesley breaking the fourth wall, addressing the audience and giving an overview of his last six weeks as an assassin saying, "This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?"

Iron Man is a 2008 superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Iron Man. Directed by Jon Favreau, the film is about Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), a billionaire industrialist and master engineer who is captured by terrorists in Afghanistan. Ordered to build a missile for them, Stark uses his resources instead to build a powered exoskeleton to make his escape. Returning to the United States, Stark improves his armor and becomes the technologically advanced superhero Iron Man. Gwyneth Paltrow plays his personal assistant Pepper Potts, Terrence Howard plays jet pilot James Rhodes, and Jeff Bridges plays Obadiah Stane.The film was in development from 1990 at Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and New Line Cinema, before Marvel Studios reacquired the rights in 2006. They put the project in production as their first self-financed film. Favreau signed on as director, aiming for a realistic feel, and he chose to shoot the film primarily in California, rejecting the East Coast setting of the comics to differentiate the film from numerous superhero movies set in New York City-esque environments. During filming, the actors were free to create their own dialogue (an uncommon practice in other big budget films) because pre-production was focused on the story and action. Rubber and metal versions of the armors, created by Stan Winston's company, were mixed with computer-generated imagery to create the title character.Marvel and Paramount Pictures, the distributor, planned a $50 million marketing campaign for the film, which is modeled on Paramount's successful promotion of Transformers (2007); Hasbro and Sega will sell merchandise, and product placement deals were made with Audi, Burger King and 7-Eleven. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, particularly praising Downey's performance. The film's stars have signed on for two sequels, and Downey also cameos as Stark in the upcoming The Incredible Hulk.During a business trip to Afghanistan to demonstrate his company's new weapon system, Tony Stark is attacked and kidnapped by a terrorist group called the Ten Rings that order him to build them a version of Stark Industries' "Jericho Missile", an extremely destructive, multi-warhead weapon. While pretending to work on it for three months, he and fellow captive Dr. Yinsen (Shaun Toub) build a crude but strong power armor, powered from a miniature arc reactor, a fictional power source Stark invents. The arc reactor supplies energy to an electromagnet which protects Stark's heart from the embedded shrapnel in his chest. Dr. Yinsen is killed in the ensuing escape attempt when he stalls the guards to buy Stark enough time to charge the suit. Using the built-in weapons and rockets in his suit, Stark kills several terrorists, destroys their stockpile, and launches himself into escape. He is later picked up by the Air Force. Upon returning to the United States, Stark declares that Stark Industries will no longer manufacture weapons, a move which his business partner Obadiah Stane tells him is blocked by the board members shortly after.During his self-imposed sabbatical from public life, Stark tinkers with the design of his power suit, refining its flight capability, and builds a more powerful and reliable arc reactor, both to power his pacemaker and the suit. During his first public appearance since his kidnapping, he is shown pictures of Stark Industries weapons in the hands of terrorist groups, including the system he refused to build for them. He also discovers that Stane has been "dealing under the table" to both sides in the conflict, as well as being the one to shut Stark out of the board while he recovers. Faced with the realization of what his company has done, Stark dons the power suit and flies to Afghanistan, rescuing Yinsen's village from the Ten Rings. In destroying their weapon stockpiles, he accidentally draws the attention of the United States Air Force and his friend Jim Rhodes, who is an Air Force Lt. Colonel handling weapons development.Determined to make amends for his mistakes, Stark sends his assistant Pepper Potts to find the shipping records of Stark Industries, so he can track down the illicit shipments and destroy them. While hacking into the system she discovers that it was Stane who hired the Ten Rings to kill Stark, but they had reneged on the deal when they realized who the target was. She also discovers that Stane has recovered the power suit prototype (Iron Man Mk I), and has reverse engineered his own version. Stane, upon realizing Pepper's discovery, steals Stark's arc reactor from his chest to power his new suit, leaving Stark for dead. Using his first reactor, which was not designed to power the suit, Stark does battle with Stane in Los Angeles, defeating him when the larger arc reactor that powers Stark Industries is deliberately overloaded. Stark barely makes it out alive when his reactor almost fails completely, but reactivates. Afterwards, Stark makes his identity public at a press conference.When Tony Stark is forced to create a life support suit to keep him alive after an accident he decides to use the technology in his suit to fight crime.    Actress Hilary Swank will have a cameo in the film. Iron Man co-creator Stan Lee will also cameo, where he appears with three blonde women and is mistaken for Hugh Hefner by Tony Stark. Favreau announced the Mandarin as the film’s villain at Comic-Con International on July 22, 2006. After filming, Favreau compared the Mandarin to Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, in that his role is a presence rather than a physical antagonist.    Originally director Jon Favreau had stated his intent to cast a newcomer in the role of Tony Stark. On September 28, 2006, Robert Downey Jr. was cast as Iron Man. Downey was a big fan of the comic book, and described his challenge as portraying "a wealthy, establishmentarian, weapons manufacturing, hard drinking, womanising prick into someone who is likeable and a hero." Downey set up an office next to Favreau, discussing his role and becoming highly involved in pre-production. Terrence Howard prepared for the role by visiting Nellis Air Force Base on March 16, 2007, where he observed HH-60 Pave Hawk rescue helicopters and F-22 Raptors. Gwyneth Paltrow went to the source material, reading many comic books lent by her husband, Chris Martin.