在外星人的眼中,地球人就是供他们玩乐的消遣。一群外星人打了一个赌,赌注是地球的存亡。他们在地球上随机选了一个人,赋予他心想事成的超能力,如果这个人最终成为了贪得无厌的恶人,外星人就选择把地球毁灭,但如果这个人依然维持着善良的本性,则意味着地球仍然有着继续运转的意义。
平凡而又内向的中学老师尼尔(西蒙·佩吉 Simon Pegg 饰)成为了这名干系到地球存亡的天选之子,在拥有了超能力后,尼尔的身边发生了一连串有惊无险令人不知该笑还是该害怕的意外。与此同时,尼尔默默爱慕的女子凯瑟琳(凯特·贝金赛尔 Kate Beckinsale 饰)也被卷入了危险之中。
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”