Plot Summary (Sneakers) Sneakers (1992)
A 1969 college prank ends with the wrong man arrested
In a wintry 1969 prologue, two college students — Martin Brice and his roommate Cosmo — sit in a dorm room hacking the era's mainframes for ideological mischief: moving Republican campaign donations to the Black Panthers, charging Richard Nixon's pension to PETA. Brice steps out for pizza. The FBI raids the dorm while he is gone. Cosmo is arrested. Brice never goes home, never finishes school, and spends the next twenty-three years living under the assumed name Martin Bishop.
In 1992, Bishop runs a security firm that breaks into things for money
Bishop (in Sneakers) leads a small San Francisco "tiger team" — corporate security testers hired by banks and businesses to break in and demonstrate the holes. His crew: Donald Crease (in Sneakers), an ex-CIA officer with a wife and kids; Mother (in Sneakers), a paranoid conspiracy theorist and electronics savant; Carl Arbogast (in Sneakers), a teenage hacker; and Whistler (in Sneakers), a blind phone-phreaking genius whose ear can identify a city by its traffic. The opening sequence is a bank-vault heist that turns out to be a paid penetration test.
Two men who say they are from the NSA make Bishop an offer he can't refuse
Two men identifying themselves as NSA officers — Buddy Wallace and Dick Gordon — confront Bishop with his real identity. They want him to steal a black box from a mathematician named Gunter Janek, a friend of the agency working on a cryptography contract. In exchange, they will erase the 1969 fugitive warrant. Bishop pulls the team in.
The black box turns out to break every cryptosystem on earth
The team steals the box from Janek's office in a sequence built around Whistler's ear and Carl's hands. When Mother and Carl reverse-engineer it, they discover what it is: a universal decryption device, a machine that breaks public-key cryptography. Federal Reserve traffic, air traffic control, the power grid, the National Security Agency itself — every encrypted system in the world is open to whoever holds the box.
That night, Bishop sees on television that Gunter Janek has been murdered. The men he handed the box to were not from the NSA.
Bishop's old girlfriend is recruited to help find his old roommate
To learn what they have walked into, Bishop reaches out to Liz (in Sneakers), his ex-girlfriend, a music teacher. She helps Whistler trace the false NSA agents, which leads to a remote estate. Bishop is taken inside and brought face to face with Cosmo (in Sneakers) — alive, prosperous, and explicitly the architect of the entire operation. Prison turned Cosmo into an organized-crime functionary; the box was his bid for the keys to the world.
Cosmo's pitch is a worldview, not a plan
Cosmo doesn't try to recruit Bishop with money. He delivers a monologue: that the next world war will be fought over information, that whoever controls the data controls everything, and that he and Bishop together can dismantle a system both of them spent their lives outside of. Bishop refuses. Cosmo has him drugged and dumped.
The team plans a heist into Cosmo's company
Bishop returns with one objective: get the box back. The crew breaks into PlayTronics, Cosmo's front company, in the film's centerpiece sequence. Whistler navigates by sound from the van. Carl rappels through ducts. Bishop, escorted through the building by an unknowing executive, swaps a child's toy box for the real one. He is caught by Cosmo at the elevator and forced to surrender the device.
A second feint inside the second feint gets the box back
In a final reversal, the team springs Bishop and gets the real box out of the building — the swap had been a swap of swaps. They return to a parking lot with the device.
The real NSA arrives, and the team negotiates for utopia
The actual NSA — represented by Bernard Abraham (James Earl Jones) — corners the team in a parking lot. The team has the box; the agency wants it. In a scene of comic precision, the crew negotiates not for money but for personal wishes: Crease wants a vacation in the Winnebago, Mother wants the phone number of a particular woman, Carl wants the Republican Party to give to the United Negro College Fund. Bishop asks for his record erased. Abraham agrees. Before handing the box over, Mother removes the chip that actually performs the decryption — so that the team has surrendered an inert shell.
Coda
The film closes on news reports of unexplained financial transfers and political donations: anonymous gifts to Amnesty International, the United Negro College Fund, Greenpeace. The implication is that Bishop's crew kept the chip. The credits roll over Branford Marsalis's soprano saxophone.