One year after the events of Lethal Weapon, LAPD sergeants Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh are pursuing unidentified suspects transporting an illegal shipment of gold krugerrands. The Afrikaner apartheid government of South Africa subsequently orders local consul-general Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) and security agent Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O'Connor) to warn both detectives off the investigation; they are reassigned to protecting an obnoxious federal witness, Leo Getz (Joe Pesci), after an attack on Murtaugh's home.
The story begins in 1913 in Denmark, when Karen Dinesen (a wealthy but unmarried woman) asks her friend Baron Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) to enter into a marriage of convenience with her. Although Bror is a member of the aristocracy, he is no longer financially secure; therefore, he agrees to the marriage, and the two of them plan to move to Africa to begin a dairy farm.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15-year-old David Rice gives his crush, Millie Harris, a snow globe. A bully, Mark Kobold, throws the globe onto the ice near a river. While trying to retrieve it, David falls through the ice and is pulled away by the current. He suddenly finds himself in the local library and discovers he can "jump" (teleport) from one place and instantly appear in another. Amazed with his new ability, he runs away and is believed dead by his alcoholic father.
Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) takes command of the MV Maersk Alabama, an unarmed container ship from the Port of Salalah in Oman, with orders to sail through the Gulf of Aden to Mombasa, Kenya. Wary of pirate activity off the coast of the Horn of Africa, he and First Officer Shane Murphy (Michael Chernus) order strict security precautions on the vessel and carry out practice drills. During a drill, the vessel is chased by Somali pirates in two skiffs, and Phillips calls for help. Knowing that the pirates are listening to radio traffic, he pretends to call a warship, requesting immediate air support. One skiff turns around in response, and the other – manned by four heavily armed pirates led by Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) – loses engine power trying to steer through the Maersk Alabama 's wake.
In Ancient Egypt, Yocheved and her two children, Miriam and Aaron, watch as newborn Hebrew boys are taken and ruthlessly killed as ordered by Pharaoh Seti I, who fears that an increase of Hebrew slaves could lead to rebellion. Fearing for her own newborn son's safety, Yocheved places him in a basket afloat on the Nile. Miriam follows the basket to the Pharaoh's palace and witnesses her baby brother safely adopted by Queen Tuya, who names him Moses.
In the Himalayas, a failed rescue mission results in a raccoon falling to its death (a parody of Cliffhanger). Ace Ventura then undergoes an emotional breakdown and joins a Tibetan monastery. After he has recovered, he is approached by Fulton Greenwall, a British correspondent working for a provincial consulate in the fictional African country of Nibia. Because Ace's influence is disruptive to the monastery, the Grand Abbot gives Ace excuses to justify his departure, and sends him with Greenwall.
In an alternate 1982, an alien ship inexplicably stops over Johannesburg. When investigation teams enter the ship, they discover a population of sick and malnourished extraterrestrials, derogatorily referred to as "prawns". The South African government confines the aliens to "District 9", a government camp that is located outside of Johannesburg. Twenty-eight years later, in 2010, following periodic conflict between the aliens and the locals living near District 9, the government hires private military company Multinational United (MNU) to relocate the aliens to a new internment. Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), an Afrikaner bureaucrat, is appointed by Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar), an MNU executive and his father-in-law, to lead the relocation.
A Drax Industries Moonraker space shuttle on loan to the United Kingdom is hijacked in mid-air and MI6 operative, James Bond, agent 007, is assigned to investigate. En route to England in a small charter plane, Bond is attacked by the crew and pushed out of the plane by the mercenary assassin Jaws. He survives by stealing a parachute from the pilot, whilst Jaws lands on a circus tent.
In Cape Town, South Africa, ex-CIA NOC operative turned traitor and international criminal Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) acquires a data storage device from rogue MI6 agent Alec Wade (Liam Cunningham). After the pair is attacked by a team of mercenaries led by Vargas (Fares Fares), Wade is killed and Frost is cornered by the gunmen, leaving him no choice but to surrender to the American consulate.
Zohan Dvir (Adam Sandler) is a kind-hearted superhuman Israeli counter-terrorist and the finest and most respected soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. However, Zohan has become both disgusted and disenchanted by the constant fighting, secretly dreaming of moving to the USA and becoming a hairdresser. This reaches a breaking point when a barbecue he hosts is interrupted by the IDF sending Zohan on a mission to stop a Palestinian terrorist group being led by his personal arch-enemy, Fatoush "the Phantom" Hakbarah (John Turturro), another superhuman. Despite being upset over his ruined party, Zohan sees it as his long awaited chance to desert the IDF and move to America. During the pursuit he fakes his own death and smuggles himself onto a flight to New York City, cutting his own hair and taking the alias "Scrappy Coco" (the names of two dogs he shared the flight with) while claiming that he is "Half Australian, Half Mount Everest." Meanwhile, the Phantom becomes rich and famous for supposedly killing Zohan and starts his own fast-food business, "Muchentuchen".
Arthur (Clive Owen) is portrayed as a Roman cavalry officer, also known as Artorius Castus, the son of a Roman father and a Celtic mother, who commands a unit of Sarmatian auxiliary cavalry in Britain at the close of the Roman occupation in 467 A.D. Arthur is loyal to Rome and a devout Catholic, but follows the teachings of Pelagianism, which many consider heretical. He and his men guard Hadrian's Wall against the Woads, a group of native Britons who are rebels against Roman rule, led by the mysterious Merlin (Stephen Dillane).
Xi and his San tribe (of !Kung bushmen) are "living well off the land" in the Kalahari Desert. They are happy because of their belief that the gods have provided plenty of everything, and no one among them has any wants. One day, a Coca-Cola bottle is thrown out of an airplane and falls to Earth unbroken. Initially, Xi's people suppose this strange artifact is another "present" from the gods and find many uses for it. (They employ it as a crafts tool, blow the top to make music, etc.) But unlike anything that they have had before, there is only one glass bottle to go around. With everyone wanting it at once, they soon find themselves experiencing envy, anger, and even violence.
A massive metal ring with engraved cover stones is discovered in the sands of Giza, Egypt in 1928, by an archaeologist named Langford and his young daughter, Catherine. Many years later, the elderly Catherine Langford offers Egyptologist and linguist Daniel Jackson the chance to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the cover stones. Jackson accepts and travels to a US Air Force installation where he examines the stones. Special Operations Colonel Jack O'Neil arrives to take command of the project and he declares it "classified" before Jackson can begin his research.
James Bond—Agent 007—is assigned to aid the defection of a KGB officer, General Georgi Koskov, covering his escape from a concert hall in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia during the orchestra's intermission. During the mission, Bond notices that the KGB sniper assigned to prevent Koskov's escape is a female cellist from the orchestra. Disobeying his orders to kill the sniper, he instead shoots the rifle from her hands, then uses the Trans-Siberian Pipeline to smuggle Koskov across the border into Austria and then on to Britain.
Motaba, a fictional virus which causes a deadly fever, is discovered in the African jungle in 1967. To keep the virus a secret, U.S. Army officers Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and William Ford (Morgan Freeman) destroy the camp where it was found.