It's 1996. Russian president Boris Yeltsin is attempting to pull his country through rough economic times and his approval rating is very low. Enter George Gorton (Jeff Goldblum), Dick Dresner (Anthony Lapaglia), and Joe Shumate (Liev Shreiber), three American political consultants who are contacted by some mysterious Russian business to go to Russia and try to help Yeltsin win the upcoming election. They consent, but when they get there, it's chilly in every sense of the word and they have no access to the man they're supposed to help. They set out to win over Yeltsin's daughter as a means of ingratiating themselves to Yeltsin himself, and set out to bring Western methods to an election that could possibly be undermined by Yeltsin's own staff.