Joan Steffend

Based on Scott Smith's bone-chilling blockbuster 1993 novel, A Simple Plan is a bit of a departure for horror-film director Sam Raimi. Instead of flying eyeballs and dancing corpses, A Simple Plan is a taught crime thriller in the vein of Joel Coen's Academy Award-winning Fargo. Set during the white winters of Minnesota, this story tells the eerie tale of Hank and Jacob Mitchell (played by Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) who, along with a buddy, find a downed single-engine plane buried in the snowy woods. Inside it is a decaying pilot and a bag carrying four million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The men decide to hide the money until spring when the snow is melted and the plane is found. If no one notices the missing money at that time, they will split it and live a wealthy new life. A simple plan, right? Wrong. Much like Humphrey Bogart's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, things can only get worse, as distrust and greed creep into the minds of the principles. They find it difficult to decide which one gets to hold the money — and even more impossible to keep from dipping into the stash until spring. And so on. It also becomes increasingly tough to keep a secret of this magnitude. And if all this doesn't get movie-goers' right-brains working, it seems there are suspicious characters in town who just may be able to link them to the plane, forcing the more dangerous and bloody question of what to do with those people and how to cover their tracks.

In a gym bag. That's how three men (Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Brent Briscoe) size up what they've found in the snowy Minnesota woods. They've come across a downed plane with a rotting corpse inside...and over $4 million stuffed inside a duffel bag. Finders, keepers? Maybe. But first they'll need a foolproof plan. So they and the wife (Bridget Fonda) of one of the men start out with a scheme that's perfect in its simplicity...and lethal in its miscalculation of the human heart.

Two brothers and a friend find $4 million in the cockpit of a downed plane. The pilot is dead. No one is looking for the money. To keep it, all they have to do is wait. IT ALL SOUNDED SO SIMPLE...