The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman), a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin.

With the Cold War rapidly coming to an end, retired CIA operative Sam Boyd has taken up freelancing as a corporate spy for cosmetics giant Maxine Gray, only to find that his hands-on style of espionage is being rendered obsolete by the capabilities of younger computer hackers.

Boyd is tasked with chaperoning Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko, a KGB mole who had been caught and imprisoned ten years earlier, and the briefcase containing the money to Berlin, where they will both be traded for Benjamin Sobel, a U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union during the 1960s.

After securing fake IDs and credit cards and evading a police dragnet, the pair go to Faisal, a Saudi arms dealer previously used by the CIA to support anti-communist movements, to see about the money, but find that the easing of the Cold War has left him practically impoverished.

In Paris, Grushenko reunites with his apparent girlfriend, Natasha Grimaud, who is in reality his daughter and works at a Japanese corporation where she can wire their money to a Swiss bank account to be withdrawn as clean bills.

Due to the changing political environment in the Soviet Union, Meyer was forced to quickly finish his screenplay "that struggled to reflect fast-moving events in Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall was collapsing.

"[3] Time Out similarly described the film as "offer[ing] familiar spy movie clichés, and although Meyer's direction creates a moderately menacing atmosphere, his script is at best undemanding, at worst simplistic.

"[4] Variety called the film a "muddled comedic-thriller" and added, "Writer-director Nicholas Meyer also is all over the map with his direction and script, which begins as a thriller (complete with portentously brooding music by Michael Kamen) then shifts to a sort of screwy comedy.

He added:It's a shame, because a movie with Hackman and Baryshnikov, and Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn among the villains, plus good minor roles from Nadim Sawalha (as a sweating, ruined Arab entrepreneur) and Andreas Grothusen (as an ex-Nazi forger) really should be better than this.