Plot summary

New York City, 1991Detective Matt Scudder (Liam Neeson) is in a car with his partner. He then enters a bar where cops don't have to pay for their drinks. The bartender serves Matt two liquor shots and a cup of coffee. Two punks then come in and try to take some money, when the bartender says 'no'. They shoot the man in the chest, prompting Matt to take his gun and fire at them. He runs into the street and shoots one man down. The second man and a third drive away. Matt shoots the driver while the final man flees. Matt gets him in the thigh and follows him down some steps. Matt shoots him down.Over the opening credits, we see a woman lying down with her eyes wide open. A man kisses her cheek. Then we see another man next to him. The camera pans back to show the woman's mouth is taped closed. A tear rolls down her cheek.Eight years later, Matt, now a recovering alcoholic, is in a diner about to have a meal when a junkie named Peter (Boyd Holbrook) approaches him, asking Matt for help for Peter's brother. Matt at first doesn't seem interested, but then seemingly out of empathy for the young lad, follows Peter out and goes with him to the home of his brother, Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens). Kenny knows of Matt's work as a private investigator and offers him $20,000 to find the men that kidnapped and killed his wife, despite Kenny paying the ransom they requested. Matt figures out that Kenny is a drug dealer. Kenny corrects him and says he is a drug trafficker. And he should know the difference. Matt refuses to help him, assuming he simply wants to exact vigilante justice. He closes the lid on the money offered and abruptly walks out.Matt attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.Matt returns to his apartment and finds Kenny sitting in the hall outside his apartment waiting for him. He tells her his wife's name (Carrie) to assure Matt that he did care about his wife. Through a flashback, we see the moment Kenny got the phone call from the kidnappers demanding a ransom of $1 million. The kidnapper arrives at this figure by estimating the weight of his wife and how much the equivalent weight in cocaine would fetch. The kidnapper emphasizes he would easily pay this amount for the illicit powder, surely the flesh of his wife should be worth as much. Kenny emphatically pleads he doesn't have that kind of money. The kidnapper casually agrees to cut it in half and demands $500,000. Kenny holds firm and haggles him down to $400,000.To prove that he does in fact have her, the main kidnapper provides a physical description of Carrie's breasts. He threatens to cut off one of Carrie's breasts and send it to Kenny as further proof that he has her. Kenny complies and brings the money to the area described and waits as instructed for Carrie to be placed back in his car. However, She never arrives. He is then told she will be at their home. Kenny races home to find her still absent. He is then told to look in the trunk of an old car in Red Hook. There are several bags in there. Kenny picks one up and cuts it open. Blood spills out.Kenny hands Matt a tape recorder that was left in the trunk. Matt listens to it after Kenny leaves. It contains a recording of Carrie in the throes of the horror the kidnappers perpetrated on her. The topless Carrie screams as her torture and mutilation apparently begins. This gives Matt cause to investigate.Matt looks around Red Hook to get leads. What he knows is that the kidnappers were most likely involved with the D.E.A. All the people he asks say they saw a van and two men close to where Carrie was last seen. Every person Matt asks gives him a different version of what was written on the van, since the two men keep repainting the van.Matt goes to the library to find articles on similar killings. He reads two articles on victims named Marie Gotteskind and Leila Andrersen. Behind him is a street kid named T.J. (Brian "Astro" Bradley) who is being chastised by the librarian for making a mess and sleeping on the premises. Matt intrudes to save the boy from further grilling. He asks him for help with looking for other articles. T.J. translates Marie's surname, Gotteskind, as a German name that means, "Child of God." Together, they learn that a leg was found in a dumpster by a florist, while other bags filled with body parts were in the pond of a cemetery. Matt offers to shake the boys hand to thank him for his help. The boy is not amused and states his time is valuable. How much, Matt asks? Ten dollars, the boy responds. Matt gives him twenty and asks if he'd like to get a burger. The boy advises him that he does not eat meat. But he would none the less like to "get his eat on." At a diner Matt treats TJ to pancakes.Matt goes to the cemetery to speak with the groundskeeper, Jonas Loogan (Olafur Darri Olafsson). At first Loogan is happy to see him, assuming he's a police officer responding to his request for a ride along to help him flesh out the details of a book he is writing. Loogan senses something is not right and gives Matt a fake name of his boss to test him. Matt fails the test, but is unfazed. He questions Loogan about the bags he found in the pond. Loogan is quite forthcoming. Yet, he states he repressed the memory of finding the dead woman in all those bags. He acts upset that Matt reminded him of it. Matt tries to recover by asking him what his book is about. Loogan shrugs him off by saying, "don't patronize me." He then drives away in his garbage collecting vehicle.Matt waits for Loogan across the street from the cemetery after his shift and follows him to his apartment. Matt discovers T.J. has been following him, trying to aid him in detective work. Matt tells him to stop following him. He leaves him to find Leila's fiance Reuben (Mark Consuelos), an out-of-work actor who is working out at home in the afternoon. He also just happens to live in the building across the street from Loogan. Inside his apartment Matt asks Reuben about the last time he saw Leila. He says he was supposed to meet her at a cafe. But instead he witnessed her getting taken into a van by two men and a third - the driver. Matt suspects Reuben of also being a drug dealer. There is a joke here as Matt says, "or would you prefer 'Trafficker'", which is a call back to the distinction Kenny made earlier.Matt looks out the window and sees a cage of birds on the rooftop of the building across the street. He goes to that building and finds a locked shed on the rooftop that belongs to Jonas. The shed is Loogan's writing room. Matt finds a page of unfinished prose he was writing, along with pictures of Reuben and Leila having sex taken from a vantage point directly across, presumably from Jonas's window or the roof top. Jonas finds Matt in there and takes out a knife. Matt convinces him to put it down. Jonas admits that he was the driver when he and the two men kidnapped Leila. He didn't like that she was doing drugs with Reuben, so he conspired with the two men to take her away from there and keep her safe. Instead, they had Jonas drive to a spot where he witnessed the main kidnapper cutting her blouse open and forcing her to choose which of her breasts she wants to keep while he cuts off the other one. Horrified, Jonas fled the scene. Matt asks where he can find them. Jonas feeds his birds and gives Matt one name (Ray) before he jumps off the roof and lands on a car.We meet the two kidnappers, Ray and Albert (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson), in their home, reading about Y2K fears. Ray delivers the line that is uses as the tag line on the poster, "People are afraid of all the wrong things." They drive by the home of another drug trafficker, Yuri Landau (Sebastian Roche). They see Yuri's pretty 14-year-old daughter Ludmilla, better known as Lucia (Danielle Rose Russell), walking her dog. She politely waves to the men as she passes their van, presuming they'd stopped out of kindness to let her pass with her dog. In fact Ray is enchanted by her.Matt goes to a store and asks the owner about Marie Gotteskind. Matt later goes to an apartment where he is struck by the owner and his son since they have apparently been repeatedly accused of killing her. They tell Matt that she was a cop and that she was dealing drugs along with them.Matt comes across T.J. in the streets, now carrying a gun he found. Matt tells him how to use it and then says T.J. should shoot himself in the head because that's all that can happen if he's carrying it.The next day, Matt is followed by a man coming out of a van with East Village Plumbing Supply written on it, similar to the one the kidnappers were driving. Matt gets into an apartment and hides himself. He wraps a scarf around his fist and gets the man to peek in through the window. As he does he smashes through it into the guy's face. Matt then finds out the man is an agent with his partners. They take Matt in a van and drop him off after he asks them about Marie and gets no answers.Matt gets into Peter's apartment where he's about to shoot up. On the wall are dozens of nude paintings of Carrie, as Peter was in love with her. He painted her nude portrait as a gift for Kenny which hangs in his living room. Here though the poses are far more provocative. Matt tells him to tell Kenny that he will return him his money since he doesn't want to be involved in this case anymore.In the rain, T.J. is found by two punks that want their gun back. He tells them he threw it in the river, so they beat him with his backpack. Matt finds him at Bellevue Hospital. There, he learns from the doctor that T.J. has sickle cell anemia, which was triggered by either the rain or the assault. When T.J. wakes up, he asks Matt why he stopped being a cop. Matt reveals that during the shootout (from the opening scene), one of the bullets accidentally struck a 7-year-old girl in the eye, killing her, with his drinking apparently causing him to miss his intended target. Matt has been sober ever since. "It kind of took all the fun out of it," we hear him repeatedly say at the end of each AA sharing session.Ray and Albert break into the Landau home and tase the dog before tasing Lucia and kidnapping her after she tends to her sick mother.Peter finds Matt and brings him to the Landau home where the kidnappers have called and are demanding a ransom for Lucia. Yuri answers and tries to negotiate. Matt takes the phone from him and tells Ray that they won't get a cent if Lucia is harmed. The kidnappers claim that their earlier dismemberment of Carrie was a one time event--they cut Carrie because Kenny cut the ransom payment--but this claim is suspect given that Leila met a similar fate to Carrie. Matt negotiates with Ray to prove that the girl is safe by asking Lucia for the name of her current dog, the name of her previous dog, and what happened to that dog. When Ray succeeds in this, they arrange a drop. Matt calls T.J. on a phone he left him and asks him to go to his place and get a box, and to give it to Peter. T.J. comes with Peter and the box, as T.J. did not trust Peter alone with it.Matt, Kenny, Peter, Yuri, and T.J. all go to the cemetery to meet with the kidnappers. Peter is hiding behind the tombstones with a rifle. They make the exchange, though Lucia's hands are bloodied due to losing several fingers, with Ray making a comment that this happened before the conditions were set. The girl returns to her father, and Albert takes the money. He realizes it's counterfeit and tries to tell Ray before Matt takes out his gun and shoots Ray twice in the chest, though he is saved by his bulletproof vest. Albert shoots at everyone and hits Peter, while Matt manages to get Ray in the side, wounding him. The kidnappers get away in their van while Matt and Kenny tend to a dying Peter. Peter tries admit his love for Carrie, but since he can only say "I loved...", Kenny takes it as an admission of brotherly love, and he returns it. Matt goes to the car and sees T.J. is missing.T.J. snuck into the back of the kidnappers' van and stowed away during their return home. He gets the street name and lets Matt know. In their house, Albert tries to patch up Ray's bullet wound. They go down to the basement where Albert instead strangles Ray with the garrote. Choking the life out of him on the floor. He goes back upstairs to eat. Shortly Matt, Kenny, and T.J. enter the house. Albert casually says, you can have your money back. Matt cuffs Albert to a pipe and leaves him to Kenny. Matt sends T.J. back to his place in a cab. Kenny whacks Albert in the head with a bottle and goes downstairs to find Ray. Albert gets himself loose. Matt decides to go back inside and finish the job, remembering the 12 Steps he heard at an AA meeting--close ups of Matt and a voice over of a woman reciting the 12 steps of AA meetings are interspersed throughout the finale film, starting from the shoot out in the cemetery, where action is freeze framed as Matt seeming recounts the 12 steps in his head.Upon reentering the house, Matt finds a bloody scene. Albert is not where he left him. He veers down to the basement and sees Kenny dead on the staircase. His hand severed clean off. A pool of blood covers remaining the steps. Matt slips on the blood and falls down the half flight of steps to the bottom. Albert approaches from behind and attempts to strangle him to death with the garrote. As he does this, Matt fires his side arm backwards, but is unable to hit Albert. Matt manages to grapple free as Albert heads to the sink to retrieve a large meat cleaver. Matt eyes the taser Ray had pocketed earlier to protect himself just slipping out of his track pant pocket as he lays head against the far wall. He lunges for the taser just as Albert launches at him with the cleaver, nailing him in the groin causing Alberts blow to land in the shoulder of his dead partner Ray. He tasers him once again in the neck. Matt grabs a gun on the floor. As Albert begins to speak a word or two Matt shoots him clean in the head, cutting off anything he was attempting to say.Matt returns home to find T.J. sleeping on the couch. He spots a drawing that T.J. made of himself as a superhero with a sickle insignia on the chest. Matt sits down and slowly closes his eyes. When he wakes up, T.J. is gone, preferring not to have anyone looking after him.