Three men board the same plane from London to Venice: Melvyn Orton, Dudley Moore, a shy and unassuming clerk; Mike Lawton, Bryan Brown, a professional hitman; and Maurice Horton, Richard Griffiths, a bank manager who also serves as mayor in a small UK city. They arrive at the glamorous Hotel Gabrielli, each awaiting a message: Melvyn expects a real estate lead in Venice, Mike expects a contact from the Mafia, and Maurice expects a date secured through Medi-Date. The hotel’s Italian bellboy struggles with English and confuses the names Orton, Horton, and Lawton, delivering all three messages to the wrong man. The mix-up sets the stage for a web of miscommunications that will pull every character into a trap of mistaken intentions and scrambled loyalties.
At the villa and the hotel, the misunderstandings compound. Melvyn is dispatched to the house of Scarpa, a mob boss, under the impression that he is delivering information to his own employer, but Scarpa and his men mistake Melvyn for a willing intermediary and begin torturing him to reveal who is behind the supposed hit. Meanwhile, Maurice is lured into a lunch date with Caroline Wright, a sharp, persuasive woman who is secretly part of a larger scam aimed at selling a Venetian villa for a fast cash windfall. Maurice, believing Caroline to be his date, is intrigued by her sales pitch and the illusion of romance it creates. Mike, on his end, shadows Maurice’s expected date, Patricia, only to repeatedly fail in his attempts to terminate her life when interruptions intervene.
The hotel becomes the center of mounting deception. Melvyn manages a brief call to his supposed English boss to confirm his story, only to be brusquely dismissed by Mr. Marshall, who viciously questions him and hangs up. Scarpa, sensing weakness, suspects that a man with a last name like Horton might be involved and urges his team to press for more information. As Melvyn endures the torture, a crucial memory flickers: a hotel guest with a nearby surname—Horton—has a similar last name. The mob then storms the hotel, dragging Melvyn along as they pursue leads that may break their own code of silence.
Back at the villa, Maurice takes Caroline out for a false romantic interlude while Patricia engages with Mike, who remains unsure about whether she is the target. Caroline’s confidence begins to unravel Maurice’s certainty about the arrangement; she hints that payment is all that matters and that she will keep quiet if her price is met. When Maurice learns that Caroline isn’t his date, he’s unsettled but still attracted enough to keep the scam going, while Patricia learns she is not Mike’s mark and that Medi-Date is a legitimate company after all.
With tensions mounting, Maurice makes a strategic move to pull money from the UK into a local villa purchase, a move overheard by both Mike and Scarpa’s crew. The realization that the two men and the mob are all interlaced in a dangerous game sharpens the target on Maurice and Horton. Scarpa decides to eliminate both Hortons in retribution for the perceived gambit gone wrong, and the plan to secure the villa’s cash becomes a violent chase across Venice’s glittering bustle.
In a tense, carefully orchestrated sequence, money changes hands and a pair of identical briefcases are swapped. One contains genuine funds intended for Scarpa’s villa, the other a disguised bomb. Melvyn, desperate to complete his agreement, is coaxed by Scarpa’s men to place a briefcase in the hotel safe, while the mob swaps the identification tags on the matching cases. Maurice, unaware of the swap’s danger, takes his own briefcase and heads toward the villa, with the mafiosi in pursuit and with Mike and Patricia drawn into the spiraling confrontation.
Chaos erupts as a struggle erupts over the money. Melvyn, anchored by a stubborn resolve to survive the enterprise, is ordered to trigger the detonator from his offshore raft, a move that becomes a race against time as Scarpa’s boat hovers dangerously nearby. A misread instruction and a swapped tag sequence nearly doom them all, but Melvyn misreads the command again and triggers the explosive that ultimately sinks Scarpa’s boat. The explosion marks a decisive blow against the mob’s grip on the afternoon’s deceit, and Mike withdraws to the safety of the Gabrielli lobby, his fear of a ruthless employer now intensified by the day’s chaotic outcomes.
In the aftermath, Mike and his employer's reach appears to tighten as the world’s rules close in on him for his missteps. A final twist reveals that Melvyn, having manipulated Mr. Marshall’s own greed, surfaces with the money—the sum of £355,000—safely tucked away, and orchestrates Marshall’s arrival at the villa so that Scarpa’s men can be avenged and the score settled. The bomb’s detonation and the mafia’s collapse leave a trail of ruined schemes and shattering relationships.
The epilogue sketches a peculiar, sometimes comic, set of fates for the survivors. Melvyn, armed with a substantial windfall, heads for the Bahamas to secure his newfound wealth. Caroline’s fortunes take a different turn as she seizes a speedboat and marries a sumo wrestler, turning a villa scam into a surprising personal victory. The Hortons’ marriage, under the strain of the entire Venice affair, dissolves along with the villa itself, while Mike and Patricia—despite the chaos—end up marrying each other, choosing a precarious but resilient path forward. The hotel bellboy, a witness to the entire charade, finds himself the one to pay the price for the chaos, ultimately losing his job as the dust settles.
In this brisk, wry caper, every scene toggles between miscommunication and cunning, between luck and a calculated risk that keeps the tension taut from takeoff to the final post-credits reckoning. The film threads together themes of deception, greed, and the fragile lines between victim and accomplice, all set against the shimmering, humid backdrop of Venice and a hotel that becomes a stage for a dangerous game where a single misdelivered message can derail lives in an instant.
