At his new high school, a rebellious teen Jake Tyler is lured into an ultimate underground fighting club in a Backyard Fight, where he finds a mentor in a mixed martial arts veteran. After receiving threats to the safety of his friends and family, Jake seeks the mentoring of a veteran fighter, to train his mind and body for one final no-holds-barred elimination fight with his unrelenting personal nemesis and local martial arts champion Ryan McCarthy.

The movie opens with Brand Hauser (John Cusack) in Iqualiuit, Northern Canada. He enters a bar where some German gentlemen are chatting. He asks for a shot glass, fills it with hot sauce, and throws it back in one gulp. His synapses start firing as he pulls out a gun and shoots each of the Germans. He takes a photo of one of the gentlemen, sends it off, and disposes of the cell phone.

Cut to a jet aircraft. Hauser is the only person on board, but he is regularly chatting with the GuideStar voice. Though it is helping with navigation, it also is providing psychiatric advice.

On the flight, he chats with the former Vice President (Dan Ackroyd). The VP is sitting on the toilet throughout the video call. Hauser is instructed to fly to Turaqistan, where the VP's company, Tamerlane, is engaged in the first war to be entirely outsourced. His mission is to assasinate the Oil Minister, Omar Sherif (Lyubomir Neikov). He is to be hit because he is insisting that Turaqistan build a cross country pipeline on their own, shunning a bid from Tamerlane. For cover, he is to act as the Chair of a Tamerlane Trade Mission, which is holding a trade fair within the Green Zone (the Emerald City) of the Turaqustan capital. A highlight of the fair will be the marriage of pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) to the son of the Emerit.

All his life schoolteacher Frank Sears has carried with him a strange scar given to him by his mother before she committed suicide. The markings lead Frank to a top secret Cold War military project where an unstoppable, malignant organism is unleashed. Unaware that the creature feeds on light and energy, and moves with exponential speed, the army prepares to deploy its most sinister of all weapons - a nuclear bomb. Facing certain global catastrophe, Frank discovers his father had a diabolical connection to the creature's origin. With a ticking nuclear clock, Frank, along with the help of a hazmat specialist Carrie Freeborn, must confront the grim reality that only he is capable of stopping this living hell.