The film opens with our protagonist,
a man named Charly Matteï who is returning from a pleasant trip with his son Anatoly.
When they make it back to the city, the boy begs Charly to let him get down from the car
and watch a busker perform. Charly agreed and said he'd be right there after he parks his car.
However, just as he exits the vehicle several masked men corner him, and begin shooting at him.
Miraculously, he is still alive. While he slowly loses consciousness, he remembers a memory
from the past, where he was still a young man in prison, who is getting advice from an old mobster,
nicknamed Old-Timer, about living a life of crime. Old Timer warns him that there is no getting out
of the business once he delves in. Charly gets rushed to the hospital,
where the doctors are struggling to take out all the 22 bullets lodged in his body.
On the other side of this story, we get introduced to a man named Tony Zacchia,
who gets informed about Charly’s condition. It is obvious that Tony Zacchia is a powerful and
cruel man, which leaves us to wonder if he is the one who hired a crew to get Charly killed.
The news about Charly’s shooting is broadcasted on national TV, and the newscaster mentions that
Charly is a retired mobster. In the next scene, police captain, Marie Goldman, takes interest on
the case and decides to visit the crime scene. While Charly is in surgery, we see another
flashback of his past, when young Charly learns that Old Timer was murdered by his rival.
As a result, Young Charly accompanied by his best friends, Tony Zacchia and Karim,
decide to murder a famous mobster named Hernandez for killing their old mentor. The young men
swear an oath to remain friends forever before they set off, and take vengeance on Hernandez.
They manage to exact vengeance, and it is at this point that their journey into
the mafia world begins. Back in present time,
police captain Marie Goldman faces her superior, who advises her to lay off this case because
Charly is a former mobster, and therefore the police should just let them kill each other.
Marie ignores him and remains determined to investigate the case,
because by doing so she might also find whoever’s responsible for killing her husband.
She then goes to visit Charly in the hospital and begins questioning him.
But for some reason, Charly remains tight-lipped. She exits the room in frustration,
when Charly’s lawyer Martin walks in along with Charly’s trusted friends, Karim and Pat.
At night, captain Marie is tucking her son into bed, when she receives an ominous phone call.
She spends the rest of her night drinking while grieving her husband’s death.
Meanwhile, Karim is visibly upset and resolves to exact vengeance on whoever is responsible.
Martin, on the other hand, advises him to be patient and wait until Charly awakens
from his coma. Karim then tells Martin to look after Charly and not leave him alone.
Back at the hospital, there's a man disguises himself as a medical staff sneaks into the hospital.
He then pulls out his gun, opens the door to Charly’s room and shoots him several times.
Hearing the gunshots, the hospital residents rush to the
room and find the dead body. However, the patient is not Charly,
as captain Marie had transferred Charly to different room prior to the shooting incident.
The incident leads captain Marie to set up a surveillance crew just outside the
hospital on the next day. As she watches, Tony Zacchia enters the hospital to visit Charly.
During the visit, Tony expresses his relief that Charly is still alive. Before leaving, he hands
Charly a greeting card that lets Charly know that there are surveillance cameras everywhere,
and that the police are monitoring him through an ambulance in front of the hospital.
Not long after, Karim and Martin visit Charly at the hospital,
and takes him with them. Seeing this, Marie decides to tail their car.
It doesn't take long before Karim notices that they are being followed, so he begins to speed up
He then asks a favor from a friend to help him out.
Now that Mary is no longer following them, Karim takes the car inside an old warehouse,
where one of Tony’s men is tied up to a chair. He is palpably terrified,
so much so that he ends up pissing his pants. Charly proceeds to tell
him that no harm will come to him as long as he remains cooperative.
He reveals that he did not partake in the shooting himself, but Tony Zacchia AKA Charly’s best friend
did send his men after Charly. Plus, Tony wants Charly dead for retiring, and leaving Tony to
run their drug business on his own, and he is now afraid that Charly would one day stand in his way.
Charly is confounded to learn all this. Later on, Karim advises him to go kill Tony as soon
as possible, but Charly is still torn, because Tony is his best friend and he remembers
the oath they made when they were young. Karim relents and Martin takes Charly home,
where Charly is greeted fondly by his family. Karim returns home to his family too,
but when he steps out of his apartment that night, Tony’s men kidnap him and takes him away.
It turns out that the idea of kidnapping Charly came from the man who was tied in
the chair earlier. Of course, the tied man's plan to gain sympathy from Tony is backfire when he is
shot dead. They then cut off one of Karim’s fingers to send to his family as a warning.
Charly who is just minding his own business and going about his day
is deeply shocked and devastated to hear about Karim’s death. He goes to attend the funeral,
and witnesses Karim’s family sob in grief.
Anger and fury overtake Charly at the sight, and
he is now determined to take vengeance. Before he begins, he asks Pat to take his family to safety.
Later that night, we see Tony’s men having a festive dinner party as if
they do not at all feel any guilt after torturing a man to death the other night.
But their celebration is about to be cut short, because Charly is now a certified party pooper:
Now that the men are unarmed, Charly gives them one last chance to say goodbye to their loved ones
because it won’t be long before they’re all dead. He then proceeds to shoot one of them,
who he knows for a fact is one of the men who shot
him because he recognizes the watch he wears on his wrist.
With nothing but the sheer power of intimidation, Charly walks away scot-free
while the rest of the men cower in fear. On the next day, another one of Tony’s men
is visiting the dead crew’s grave, right when Charly arrives and kills him.
Realizing that Charly is now out for blood, Tony sent his men to ransack Charly’s home
in attempt to find Charly and his family. Luckily, they cannot seem to find anything.
While this is going on, Charly is chilling with his trusty cat on the other side of town.
Martin the lawyer arrives at Charly’s house to find it in complete disarray.
He then rushes to inform Charly about this. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, one of
Tony’s men follows him to Charly’s hideout and it does not take long before the two are surrounded.
Badass Charly holds them off while Martin tries to make his escape via boat.
But one of Tony’s men catches Martin and corners him.
In the end, Charly makes an escape with his motorcycle while Tony’s men go after him.
Because he rammed into a police car, he gets taken right back to the police’s hands,
which reunites him with Captain Marie Goldman. In the interrogation room,
Marie reveals to him a shocking information from her investigation, which is that she found a
series of bullets lodged into a wall on the crime scene.
In other words, out of the five shooters, one of them did not wish to kill Charly at all.
one of them did not wish to kill Charly at all. Moreover, Marie decides to not arrest
Charly for now because she is convinced that Tony Zacchia is behind her husband’s murder.
Later that night, Tony Zacchia is seen celebrating his daughter’s wedding.
Unbeknownst to him, Charly is right outside his house,
and manages to apprehend one of his men. Before finishing him off, Charly demands
him to hand over every data containing Tony Zacchia’s current drug transactions.
When Tony learns about what happened not long after, he becomes furious.
He leaves the party and visits his drug lab, where he finally unleashes his rage:
Tony has now lost his patience. He tells his goons to capture Charly dead or alive.
On the next morning, Pat goes to pick up Charly’s children Anatoly and Eva from school.
It looks like a typical day, until a van pulls up next to them.
The men kidnap Anatoly and Eva before driving away.
Marie arrives at the scene but finds that she is too late.
Not long after, it is revealed that the police found Eva and take her into the precinct.
The beaten and bruised Eva tells them that little Anatoly is going
to get killed unless Charly turns himself in. When Captain Marie is exiting the precinct later,
Charly suddenly steps into the car with her. He asks her to help him create a fake scenario on the
news that claims that Charly has been arrested, so that hopefully Tony would stop looking for
him and release his son. Charly even promises that he would
turn himself in once his son gets returned. Marie agrees to cooperate.
However, when Tony hears the news of Charly’s arrest, he only gets more upset. He sends one
of his goons to kill Anatoly right away, because there is no use keeping him now. Unbeknownst to
this goon, Charly is tailing him with a motorcycle to the location where Anatoly is held captive.
Inside this house, another one of Tony’s men is keeping watch of Anatoly.
He immediately gets told to kill Anatoly right now. However, instead of doing as he’s told,
He then rushes to release Anatoly, but then…
While this is going on, Charly is still outside. It appears that he is caught in barbed wire and
is desperately trying to free himself. The goon carries Anatoly outside and
shoves him into the trunk and begins to drive away, right when this happens:
Charly manages to beat him up, and carries Anatoly away.
When Charly finally makes it home, he tells his wife that they no longer need to hide
because he has gotten rid of all of Tony’s goons.
On the next day, Tony relaxing in his house, right when Charly shows up. Despite everything that has
happened, it turns out Charly is willing to put everything behind them for the sake of their
friendship. Even though Charly doesn't want to kill Tony,
Tony, who is now power-hungry is still determined to get rid of Charly.
Tony pins him to the ground and presses a gun to his face.
When Tony is caught off guard, Charly takes the opportunity to gain the upper-hand.
The police arrive just in time and proceed to arrest Tony for running a drug ring.
It turns out that Charly has helped Captain Marie procure enough evidence
to prove that Tony is guilty of being a drug lord. When Charly gets questioned by the police later,
as it turns out the police are somehow unable to find any evidence that proves
his involvement in any drug trade, so they have no choice but to release him.
Outside the precinct, he is greeted by Martin, and promptly asks Martin to take
them to the parking lot wherein he was shot. Once they arrive,
we learn that the one shooter who aimed at the wall at the time was Martin.
Feeling betrayed, Charly points his gun at Martin, but Martin proceeds to plead his case
by saying that Tony merely sent him to kill someone but never specified who. He said that he
was shocked when he found out it was Charly he was sent to kill, and he couldn’t go through with it.
It turns out that Charly symbolically fired several bullets at the wall out of
appreciation for what Martin had done for him. The last scene shows Charly and his family
having fun at the beach, and they happily walk off into the sunset.