John Bridger, a professional safecracker, has assembled a team to steal 35 million dollars worth of gold bullion from a safe in Venice, held by Italian gangsters who had stolen it weeks earlier. The team includes Charlie Croker, a professional fixer; Lyle or "Napster", a computer expert; Handsome Rob, their wheelman; Steve, their inside man; and Left Ear, their explosives expert. The heist is successful, but as they drive towards Austria with the bullion, they are stopped by men loyal to Steve, who had turned on them and takes the bullion for himself. Steve kills John when he admonishes him, and Rob drives the van over a bridge into the waters below to protect the others, using air tanks from the heist to stay alive. Steve leaves them for dead.
A year later in the United States, Charlie learns that Steve has resurfaced under a new identity and is laundering the gold through a Ukrainian jeweler named Yevhen to finance his lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles. Charlie gathers the team, and also recruits John's daughter Stella, a skilled private safe cracker, offering her the chance to get revenge on Steve for her father's death. They stake out Steve's mansion, and Stella, disguising herself as a cable technician, is able to map out its interior, allowing them to determine the location of Steve's safe containing the bullion. Coincidentally, Steve, unaware of Stella's identity, offers to go out on a date with her. Charlie and Stella devise a plan using explosives to blow the safe while Steve is away on his supposed date, using three heavily modified Mini Coopers to transport the gold out of the mansion. Charlie enlists the help of Skinny Pete for the explosives and Wrench to make the modifications on the cars.
As Steve continues to launder the gold bars, Yevhen accidentally reveals that he knows about the Venice heist. Covering his tracks, Steve kills Yevhen which infuriates Mashkov, Yevhen's cousin and a leader of a Ukrainian crime family. When Charlie and his group embark on the night of the planned heist, they find Steve's neighbors are having a party. As the explosives would draw undue attention, they abandon their plan. Stella ends up having to meet Steve after all and inadvertently gives away her identity by using similar phrases to her father. When the team arrives to help protect her, Steve taunts them that he still has the upper hand, to which Charlie responds by punching him in the nose.
