Frank Connor (Andy Garcia) is a San Francisco police officer who lives to uphold the law, but who is suddenly forced to go to increasingly desperate lengths to find a compatible bone marrow donor for his gravely ill son, Matt. Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton) is the boy’s perfect DNA match, but is also a homicidal sociopath serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison.

After Connor convinces his superiors to transport McCabe to the hospital where Matt’s transplant can be performed, the killer seizes the opportunity to stage an ingenious escape, leaving a trail of wounded and dead in his wake. the hospital becomes a battleground and Connor, who under any other circumstances would pursue McCabe and shoot him on sight, now has the opposite goal: defying, and perhaps endangering, his fellow officers, he must do everything he can to find McCabe and keep him alive to save his son.